by Sam Powers
“Okay, sending it over now. Give me a ring back if you don’t get it; I’ll be in the office for another twenty minutes, at least.”
“Back tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.”
He hung up and she waited a few minutes, checking the news headlines online before going into her mail and retrieving the file. It was extensive, with personality profiles and backgrounds, military psych assessments, past test scores.
None of that mattered. What mattered was the name, staring out of her screen at her like an accusation. Carolyn’s mouth dropped open.
“Oh my God,” she said.
15./
BUCHANAN, NEW YORK
Malone had been expecting something dramatic, and the car that had just shot across the parking lot and crashed through the front of the warehouse certainly qualified; that had to be Joe’s signal.
She dialed the number he’d given her.
It only rang once and was answered. “Wilkie.”
She recognized the name right away. “Is this Nicholas Wilkie? Sir, this is Alex Morgan, with News Now.”
“How did you get this number?”
“That’s not important sir. I’m in New York State, with Joe Brennan.”
“Where are you?” his voice sounded grave.
“We’re in a small town called Buchanan, about a mile from the Indian Head nuclear plant. There’s a warehouse at the end of a local avenue.” She began to give him directions but he cut her off.
“We’ll have a team there within an hour. Don’t move from where you are, Ms. Morgan; I can’t stress enough how dangerous this situation is, and we won’t have time to look out for civilians on scene.”
“Okay.” That didn’t sound good, Malone thought.
“If you have a safe location now, stay in it. Don’t move a muscle. As I said, we’ll be there within the hour.”
He hung up.
Malone lowered the phone and looked at the building. Now what? Brennan had been clear that he wanted her to stay away from any action. But Malone knew she wasn’t going to get the best out of the story by staying in a car a quarter-mile away. She checked her purse and took out her digital camera and her tape recorder. At the very least, she reasoned, she was going to get as close to the action as possible without getting in the way. In her experience, that was pretty close.
Alex slipped out of her car and quietly made her way to the middle of the lot, crouching behind a car for cover. She used the camera’s optical zoom to get a tightly-cropped view of the action in front of the building, where men in bulletproof vests were pushing the car back out of the building, extricating it from mangled wood framing at the same time. Then she noticed the dim light coming from the building’s west side. A doorway? If nothing else, she thought, it might be a good vantage point to scope out the interior, see what was going on inside. She started a wide half-circle of the property, looking for an approach that wouldn’t be easily seen and eventually finding one in the shadows of the adjacent building. Only a short mesh fence separated the two properties and she climbed over, dropping into the long grass and brush on the other side.
The door was unguarded; he’d probably run up front with everyone else, she reasoned. It was just fifteen feet away, and despite Joe’s demand for her to stay on the periphery, much too tempting. Alex took a furtive glance around, then made her way to the door and pushed her way inside.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The jet out of Dulles was just about to take off, taxiing its way to the beginning of its runway. Jonah and the director had seats opposite each other, so that they could compare notes on route to New York State.
They were landing at Stewart International, an air strip just southeast of Peekskill that served both the military and private planes. The agreement was that nobody federal was to contact anyone local; the chance of a County Mountie tipping the target was too great.
Before they’d left, he’d met briefly with the NSA’s Fitzpatrick; despite his own misgivings about whether he was ready, Jonah had found himself cast completely in David Fenton-Wright’s former role as deputy director and Wilkie’s right-hand man. That meant liaising frequently with other agencies, the NSA foremost among them. Fitzpatrick had agreed immediately with his assessment that both agencies were needed at ground zero, and that the risk of losing senior staff was far outweighed by the need for leadership on scene.
Where they’d disagreed was on the tangential issue of operational security; Jonah was convinced Fenton-Wright hadn’t been the only leak in the agency and had suggested as much to Fitzpatrick, who’d answered defensively, arguing that the NSA was as tight as a drum. Outside of the fact that, in reality, no agency could claim to be impervious, it was a rash statement, Jonah thought, particularly when he’d just seen Fitzpatrick, a week earlier, talking to the reporter Alex Malone. The NSA man had justified it by pointing out that she’d tipped him to a meeting with Fenton-Wright, and without her help they wouldn’t have taken the rogue deputy director down. But Jonah suspected Fitzpatrick may have been talking to her long before then; someone had been leaking Morgan details of the sniper investigation for months. It could have been David, he thought; he’d utterly misjudged his former mentor’s intentions, after all. But Fitzpatrick’s reluctance to discuss the issue made him suspicious.
The NSA man was at the other end of the private jet’s passenger cabin reading a magazine; he noticed Jonah watching him and gave him a quick smile, which Jonah returned, before casting his eyes down to the report on the table in front of him. Jonah looked up again and Fitzpatrick was watching him right back.
“How are you, my boy?” Wilkie said, breaking the silence. “A hell of a first week at the new job, I must say.”
“Yes sir,” Jonah said. “Just keeping a focus on what we know.”
“Something’s bothering you.”
Understatement of the century, Jonah thought. “Several issues, sir.”
“You don’t believe David was the sole leak, do you?”
“No sir.” Jonah was surprised by the question. “Do you mind if I ask why…”
“Because I’d reached the same conclusion,” Wilkie said. “The variety of information, the impact… it’s been too far-reaching for one man and one agenda.”
“I was thinking…”
“You were thinking that perhaps our friend Mr. Fitzpatrick likes talking to the press.”
“He’s one of the few people who had access to everything Alex Malone reported,” Jonah said. “They were together at the parking garage; she’s been right all the way down the line, which is rare for any reporter these days.”
“If you’re correct,” Wilkie said, “the question will be what we do with it. There is the rather important fact that everything she reported has been of vital national interest. The stories spurred action and led us to where we are now.”
“We can’t just let it go,” Jonah warned.
“We won’t. But there may be some tact required in dealing with Mr. Fitzpatrick. It could be quite valuable to leverage an ally within the NSA.”
BUCHANAN, NEW YORK
The asset had been reading when the car crashed through the front of the warehouse. His perch in the upper rafters of the building, just above the front entrance, gave him a perfect overview not only of the warehouse, but in particular of the accident.
Or distraction. That seemed more likely, he thought as he watched the hired guns surround the car, weapons at the ready. Something weighing the gas pedal down would do the trick. He’d been expecting something, anyway; he’d been told there would be some sort of attempt to shut the operation down.
Not that any of it mattered to the asset; his orders consisted of a short instruction list, with just one task: eliminate a single final target.
He picked up his rifle and braced it on the tripod, then used the power scope to survey the enormous building. After a few seconds of seeing nothing, he clicked the small switch on the side of the scope mount and turned on thermal imaging.
>
There. While the men below him were conveniently occupied with the car, there was a target sneaking in from the east, through the window. He followed the body heat signature as its man-like shape moved up the staircase to the second level. Then he switched off the thermal and tried to get a closer look.
No dice. The man was sixty yards away and had his head turned, facing towards the warehouse’s back end, probably trying to figure out what the crew of Koreans was up to. It was possible the intruder might be a mission impediment; but it didn’t seem likely. He wondered briefly if he was the same operative he’d spotted sneaking out of Funomora’s building in Montpellier.
It didn’t matter. The asset had one task that night, one shot to take. And then it would all be over.
Then Sarah could finally rest.
The upper floor of the warehouse was little more than a short steel grate floor and some desks. Brennan followed the catwalk around the perimeter of the building and looked the area over before he was certain he was alone. Then he took up a vantage point where the gaps in the grate were large enough to see into the back area of the lower level.
He counted eight lab-coated technicians. There was someone in uniform barking orders at them, a woman; again, it sounded like Korean. He couldn’t make her out right away, but the voice was already familiar.
Park Jae Soo, the North Korean operative.
He could just barely make out what they were doing, which seemed to involve placing the device in a final casing. It looked like an oversized bullet that had been stretched on a rack, the chrome gleaming slightly under the harsh overhead lights. The men moved carefully with the internal workings, a mish-mash of wires on a circuit board, a large cylinder of material in yellow packaging – an explosive perhaps? There was a long metal tube leading from the packaging towards the front of the device, a delivery barrel or pipe of some sort. It led into a larger chamber that filled up the nosecone.
It suddenly occurred to Brennan that, for all of his work in the months prior, he hadn’t taken the time to actually learn the inner workings of such a device. He’d gotten a general outline from Ballantine in Brussels; but if push came to shove, he realized, he had no idea how to defuse one safely. He’d just have to rip the wiring out, and pray like hell.
He craned his neck slightly to get a steeper viewing angle into the room, trying to figure out security. He knew the three men stationed at the rear of the warehouse would have an open entry point, which meant he’d have to deal with them, at the least. The scientists were probably specialists, and unlikely to engage. Park was a different matter; she was probably highly trained, his most obvious obstacle.
Ed had left him with a few tricks. A flashbang would take everyone in the room out for a minute or so, long enough to get in and destroy the device’s wiring. But that didn’t help him with the three-on-one guard situation outside the back door.
Park had stopped giving orders to the technicians and taken out her phone. She made a quick call.
“It’s ready,” she said simply. Then she nodded a few affirmatives. “A call from your phone will trigger it, and as you requested, we have a backup from my phone.” She offered a few more affirmatives. “Yes sir, I realize that. Thank you sir; it’s my honor and duty.”
That didn’t sound good, Brennan thought. If Park was the backup plan, that meant she was willing to die for the operation.
Malone crept furtively along the western wall of the warehouse, sticking to the shadows near the stairs. She’d seen a few guards but had managed to stay out of sight herself. She needed to find Brennan, Malone figured; wherever he went, her story tended to follow. There was an area past the last line of packing crates; judging by the space to the wall, it was at least six hundred square feet. She moved to the edge of the crates and peered around the corner.
A handful of men were working at tables, while two were crouched in front of a long bomb-like cylinder, minus the tail fins. A Korean woman barked instructions at people for several minutes before taking a phone call. She nodded several times and the call took about a minute. Then she put the phone away and went back to goading her workers. She was tough, not letting up on them an inch, and even though Malone couldn’t understand the words, it was obvious she was trying to keep them to some sort of timetable.
She needed to get closer; a picture of them actually working on the device could be Pulitzer material, Malone knew. She slipped the digital camera out of her coat pocket and leaned around the corner. It was a risk to move into their line of sight, she knew, but the workers had their heads down, and the woman wasn’t looking her way. She lined up a picture, a close-cropped shot of a technician with a screwdriver; he was bull-necked, with a pencil-thin moustache, and he was working meticulously on a peripheral device attached to a circuit board.
She pushed the button and in the viewfinder a small warning light blinked for a moment; what did that… Oh Hell, she thought.
The flash.
It popped just as the thought entered her head, too late to do anything about it. Alex had never been much of a shooter, but in an age of free news and drastic cost cutting, everyone was expected to contribute. She’d always had the camera on auto, always let it make the decisions about whether she had enough light.
The flash was bright, more than enough to swivel every head in the room.
Alex turned and ran, not bothering to stay and try to talk her way out of it. She headed directly for the side entrance. She could hear the footsteps behind her, the frantic voices, the woman screaming in Korean. Her heel clacked on the polished concrete floor and her breath was short, the door just twenty yards away…
The guard stepped out of nowhere, the butt of the rifle catching her flush in the forehead. He turned into a soft blur as Alex fell hard, the world out of focus, sideways, as she plummeted into unconsciousness.
16./
The asset watched it all play out with a sense of ambivalence. None of it meant anything to him anymore. He just wanted to go home, and he leaned against the rafter beam, looking down at the expanse of the warehouse, tired after so many weeks on the road.
He didn’t bother to raise his rifle for a closer look. He could tell generally what was going on, even though it was nearly eighty yards away and dimly lit; it was irrelevant to his final task, which was on the clock. First, the woman had pulled out a camera with a flash on it, which would have almost been comedic if the circumstances hadn’t seemed so serious. Second, the group of scientists working on the device had started running around like chickens with their heads cut off, unsure of whether they were in trouble with American authorities.
Then the guard had struck the woman, knocking her cold, which stirred his anger. He raised the rifle and sighted the guard’s head through the scope, then thought better of it and lowered his weapon. A moment later, another figure stepped out of the shadows of the adjacent staircase to the offices and threw a vicious elbow that knocked the guard equally unconscious. Then the man turned, his back to the asset, and picked the woman up, tossing her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. He began to run towards the side door.
Now that was interesting. He raised the rifle again and tracked the scope smoothly over to their position, following their movements and keeping the crosshairs on them. Before the asset could get a good look at who it was, the man turned again, his path cut off by guards with Chinese AK47 knockoffs. He had the same build as the man in Montpellier, that was for sure, and he moved with the assurance and sense of self-preservation that comes from having been under fire. Ex-Marine, maybe even a SEAL, the asset thought.
The man was laboring now under the extra weight, turning the corner between the row of containers to try for the side window. But the guard had returned to his post after the earlier distraction. The angle from the rafters down to the action was too tight for the asset to see the pair anymore; but he could still see the guard by the window, raising his rifle, screaming at them to back off. A foot flashed across the front of the man, kicking the
rifle away and prompting the startled guard to back down himself. Whoever he was, the asset thought, he wasn’t going down without a fight.
Or perhaps he was. The rest of the guards had caught up to them, rushing down the wide corridor between stacks of crates, surrounding the couple, guns high. A moment later they were being cuffed.
The asset had been told to expect disturbances. It was all just part of the procedure, as far as he was concerned. He reached into his upper pocket and took out the already unwrapped fruit protein bar, taking a fair-sized bite before returning it to the pocket. It was getting late, and he needed to keep his energy up for show time.
DES MOINES, IOWA
The campaign staff were staying up, enjoying the fact that they were getting a half-day off for the Fourth of July, just a few hours away.
Officially, of course, none of them were working, including the candidate. Officially, their day out in Des Moines pressing the flesh and eating barbecue would be completely unofficial.
Addison March was next door, listening to them through the thin hotel suite wall. He smiled to himself. It was going to be an important day, the fourth. He had an appropriately weighty speech memorized, a damn impressive eight minutes of solid reflection on America and national security. He had a great place to deliver it, with families thronging to the state fairgrounds; and by memorizing it, doing it off the cuff and not at a podium, he was going to make it look like one of the most impressive conversational ad-libs in campaign history.
Everything could turn on how he handled the Fourth, he thought, as he listened to them laugh and joke, the music louder than it should have been. Most of them were young; they didn’t really understand, not yet. They were overcome by their zeal for campaigning, their ideological need to proselytize. He knew the stakes were much, much higher.