The Beltway Assassin

by Richard Fox

  Shelton took off his sunglasses and took in the crime scene. He looked over his shoulder at a bomb-disposal truck, where the technicians had the mangled base of a trash can on a hydraulic lift attached to the truck’s rear.

  “When I was in Iraq, there were key parts of any IED we looked for: the explosive, trigger, initiator, power source,” Shelton said. “The bomb techs should know by now what kind of explosive the bomber used. If it’s a homemade, military, or commercial explosive, that’ll tell us how sophisticated the bomb maker’s skills are. The initiator sets off the main explosive and is almost always a blasting cap. If we can find any trace of it, we might have a lead. The trigger is connected to the initiator and sets off the explosive train. The power source…powers the trigger. Normally a battery from a motorcycle or a bunch of C or D batteries taped together.” Shelton’s eyes danced over the crime scene, taking in details.

  “That’s great, junior. Real basic stuff from Quantico. You want to expound on that a bit?”

  Shelton crossed his arms over his chest and ground a foot into the asphalt.

  “Let’s assume this is a targeted killing. The bomber put an explosive in the garbage can and waited for the victim to get near the bomb. If it was a disturbance trigger, like a mercury switch or trip wire, it would have gone off as soon as he moved the garbage can from the side of the house.” He pointed at the crater centered on the driveway. “But the bomb goes off there. So we’re looking at a remote trigger, anything from a garage door opener to a cell phone.”

  “So what?”

  “So the bomber was here. He had line of site on the victim and pushed a button to set off the bomb. The neighborhood been canvassed yet?” Shelton turned around and scanned the neighborhood. At least a dozen houses and a wooded knoll a half mile away had sight lines to the crater.

  Burkowski pulled a small notepad from a pocket and looked it over.

  “We got a couple houses in either direction from the crime scene. All of the occupants said they didn’t hear or see anything suspicious before the giant goddamn explosion. Victim’s wife said she didn’t hear anything suspicious last night either. Ambulance took her to the hospital after she started complaining about chest pains,” the older agent said.

  “The blast was what—four hours ago? And we haven’t done a full canvas?” Shelton asked. He’d graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico a few months ago, and the bureau’s standard procedures were still fresh in his mind.

  “Nope. Things are at a bit of a standstill. Take a good look at the command vehicle, and I’ll impress you with some analysis. There are at least five different federal agencies in a dick-measuring contest to take over this investigation. There’s been a major bombing on American soil, and whoever gets the arrest on this case has their career made. It’ll get worse when the three-ring media circus gets going.” Burkowski finished his coffee with a grimace.

  At the command truck, a knot of men in especially well-manicured suits jabbed fingers at each other and split their conversations between the rest of the knot and whoever was on the other end of their cell phone calls.

  “I thought I was done with petty crap like this after I left the army,” Shelton said.

  Burkowski snorted. “We may be a bit outside the Beltway, but we can’t escape DC politics. After the president’s last purge—excuse me, ‘highly encouraged early retirements’ of the bureau—everyone’s looking to suck up a bit more than usual.”

  The newly elected President Benson had taken the unusual step of auditing the senior leaders of the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. A number of civil servants were found wanting and politely asked to retire. Their replacements, noted by more than one news media outlet but not by the major networks, where well known for supporting the president’s politics.

  “Let’s get a look at the device before it goes away,” Shelton said and headed toward the bomb-disposal truck.

  They found a fat man in black fatigues with a flat-bottomed beard, which had gone out of style in the mid-1800s. He was arguing with an FBI technician, who stood next to the remains of the blown-out garbage can.

  “This needs to go to Charlottesville for exploitation,” the bearded man said.

  “Your agency doesn’t have jurisdiction on this,” the technician said. “You can come look at the device at TEDAC when your paperwork clears.”

  “You expect me to drive from Charlottesville to Quantico?” the bearded man said, looking like the technician had just suggested he perform an impossible anatomical act. The Terrorist Explosive Device and Analytic Center (TEDAC) was the FBI’s main forensic lab on the East Coast and a stone’s throw from the FBI Academy.

  “You expect us to take this to your Podunk lab and drive from Quantico to Charlottesville just so you can tell us nothing? Piss off,” the technician said.

  The bearded man went red. “What’s your name?”

  “Last name: Jablowme. First name: Heywood,” the technician said.

  The bearded man jotted the name down on a scrap of paper and stormed off.

  The technician rolled his eyes and turned his attention to Shelton and Burkowski.

  “Damn it, Sanders. Can’t you ever play nice?” Burkowski asked.

  “Where’s the fun in that? Besides, Stupid Beard over there doesn’t have the lab to exploit this like we do,” Sanders said.

  Shelton leaned over the mangled garbage can and saw gray and sandy material in the base of the can. “Incomplete detonation?” he asked.

  “Yes. You’d think they’d have det. cord run through the whole main charge to ensure a complete detonation,” Sander said.

  “What about the trigger? Initiator?”

  Sanders licked his lips and glanced at Burkowski, who nodded quickly.

  “That’s the thing. We went over the whole crime scene with a fine-tooth comb—no trigger, no wires of any kind. Binary explosive like this, ammonia nitrate and aluminum powder, won’t go boom-boom without some sort of a blasting cap,” Sander said, his voice low.

  “This kind of bomb is hard to make?” Shelton asked.

  “You kidding? I could make the explosives with fifty bucks and a trip to any drugstore,” Sander said. “I’m scratching my head over how he set it off. With an incomplete detonation like this, some part of the trigger should have survived.”

  “This like anything you saw in Iraq?” Burkowski asked.

  Shelton rubbed the stubble on his face and looked back at the wooded knoll in the distance. He remembered standing next to a bombed-out Humvee, the engine mangled like it had been through a meat grinder. They’d never found conclusive proof of how that Humvee was destroyed, but some elements of this bombing were similar.

  “I’ve got a hunch. Follow me.”

  ****

  Eric Ritter wrapped his hand around the push handle of a steel door and waited two seconds. He felt a slight tremor through the handle as the biometric readers approved his palm print and the magnetic locks disengaged with a snap.

  Thermal sensors, pressure-plate flooring, and a host of cameras and biometric sensors warded the upper three stories of the commercial building where Eric Ritter worked ostensibly as an import/export executive for a shipping concern. In actuality, the CIA’s covert Caliban Program maintained the office as cover for Ritter and the rest of his team of operatives.

  Reston, Virginia, was the ideal place for an office not wanting attention. The American government maintained buildings all along the Dulles Tech Corridor, running from the similarly named airport to the west all the way to Tyson’s Corner, where the toll road intersected with the Beltway. The locals joked that you could always spot the super-secret government buildings by the lack of business frontage, the presence of flag poles, and the suspiciously uniform security cameras on the roof, the type used only on federal government buildings.

  Ritter’s office building had several legitimate companies on the lower floors and two floors of empty space between them. Prospective tenants were few and far b
etween, since whoever owned the building advertised the space at rates nearly double the local comps.

  He nodded to the security guard with an MP5 slung over his chest and walked through the hallway, passing closed office doors. The drone of air-conditioning mixed with the click of his heels on the linoleum floor. The office alternated between the activity level of a graveyard and that of a metro station; the bipolar nature was a by-product of the agents and analysts who inhabited the building. The Caliban Program focused on the world beyond America’s borders; as such the Reston office was little more than a launch pad for the program’s operatives.

  Ritter stopped in front of a heavy wooden door and knocked. He looked up at the camera monitoring the doorway and gave a mock salute of two fingers to his brow. He winced as his arm dropped. The bullet wound he’d taken on a Russian merchant ship still hadn’t healed.

  A buzzer sounded, and Ritter opened the door.

  Shannon sat behind an expansive desk of lacquered maple, a mess of loose paper spilled across it. Her head of dark hair was bent toward her lap as she looked at something cradled in her hands. Her face, which before this day seemed impervious to the more than forty birthdays behind her, was lined and puffy.

  “You rang,” Ritter said as he sat down in the camel leather seat opposite her.

  Shannon sniffed and sat back. Her eyes were raw, worn from some catharsis weathered before Ritter’s arrival. Her face shifted into the stone mask she always wore before she spoke.

  “You have an assignment,” she said.

  “I can go to the Ukraine? Join up with Cindy and the rest of the team?” he asked. Cindy, Mike, and Carlos—his normal coterie of operatives—had been in the Ukraine for the last week without him. Shannon hadn’t shared the specifics of their mission. Her strict need-to-know policy had no exceptions.

  “No, you’re not going to a war zone until you’ve fully healed. We’ve been over this,” Shannon said, her tone cold.

  “I’m fine for combat. Send me,” he said. He’d been anxious to join Cindy since she’d left for the Ukraine. He had no worries about her abilities, but Cindy’s heart for this line of work had waned. She’d had serious misgivings about staying with Caliban since her last mission to garner the location of a nuclear warhead from a terrorist financier had ended in the messy death of her target. Some operatives could handle the killing that came with the work; some couldn’t. Cindy had told Ritter about her plans to quit the program the morning before she had a meeting with Shannon. Instead of being freed from the program, Cindy and the rest of the team had deployed to the Ukraine later that day. What had Shannon said to Cindy to get her to go on the mission?

  Shannon looked him over with her basilisk stare and slowly swiveled her chair from side to side. Her hand shot toward Ritter’s face. A pen speared through the air, and Ritter’s hands went up out of reflex to block the projectile. His left hand batted the pen from the air; his right arm wasn’t nearly as fast, as if his shoulder joint had rusted.

  Ritter grimaced and swore under his breath as he rubbed his burning shoulder.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Eric. You’d be a liability to the mission in your current state. Besides, you can’t even speak Russian,” Shannon said.

  “And what is their mission?” Ritter said through clenched teeth.

  Shannon ignored his question, pulled a manila envelope from her desk, and slid it across her desk. Tamper-proof tape was over the sealed flap, the name “Eric Gamil” printed above the tape.

  “That’s you,” she said.

  Ritter looked at the envelope but didn’t touch it.

  “Seven hours ago, a bomb exploded in Ashburn and killed a man named Michael Bendis. Michael Bendis was…a mentor.” Shannon drifted away for a moment, her mind someplace far away and long ago. She shook her head and continued.

  “You’re going to join up with the FBI and figure out who killed him and why,” she said.

  Ritter pressed his lips together. This was damn peculiar.

  “Shannon, is this a sanctioned operation? We don’t operate in the United States. You made that clear when I first came on board, and we’ve stuck to that rule ever since.” US law forbade the CIA and its covert elements such as Caliban from conducting any intelligence activities on American soil. That was the remit of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

  “This is sanctioned by the directors, and that’s why Eric Gamil is an FBI agent.” She pointed to the envelope. The directors, the leaders of the Caliban Program, were a mystery to Ritter. Only Shannon could communicate with them, and they were rarely spoken of.

  Ritter snatched a letter opener from a cup on Shannon’s desk and sliced it across the tamper tape. Inside was a badge and ID for an FBI agent with Ritter’s face and a slew of credit cards and driver’s licenses for the same man.

  “A bombing on US soil is in ‘kind of a big deal’ territory,” she said. “The FBI will elbow out any and all other parts of the intelligence and law enforcement community to keep this their baby, which is why you need that cover identity.”

  “I’ll be guilty of half a dozen felonies when I put this badge in my pocket. Why is this so important? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Shannon let out a slow breath and looked away.

  “Bendis is—was—a director. Their identities are known to a select and very small group of men and women in the United States government. We need to know who ordered the hit and why.”

  Ritter stayed quiet. This was the first concrete thing he’d ever learned about the directors. That one had been murdered begged a very scary question.

  “This is about the nuke, isn’t it?” he asked. Ritter and the rest of Shannon’s team had captured a North Korean nuclear warhead, which fell into the hands of Somali pirates months ago. Ritter took a bullet when his erstwhile Israeli Mossad allies decided they wanted the weapon for themselves. While the Mossad team was eliminated, the trail of dead behind the nuke might have gotten one body longer. Ritter and Mike had handed the weapon off to another element of the Caliban Program, but he had no idea where it had gone after that.

  Shannon nodded.

  “That’s our working hypothesis,” she said. “Only our organization, aside from the Israelis and the Koreans, knows about the weapon. If someone inside the organization—or higher—is making a move for the nuke, then we need to know who.”

  “Higher?”

  “Everyone works for someone, Eric, even the directors.”

  “Why stop at one director? Why not take them all out in one fell swoop?” he asked.

  “An excellent observation,” she said. “Find out who did this and ask them why.”

  Ritter examined the FBI badge, light glinting from the copper. There was more to this story than Shannon was telling him.

  Shannon lifted a small framed photo from her lap and set it on the desk. A much younger Shannon in navy whites stood next to a man dressed in khakis and a safari vest.

  “There’s a personal aspect to this, Eric. Bendis was an old Soviet hand. He went on countless missions behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and did great things in service of our country. After 9/11”—Shannon’s hand swept over a bare ring finger—“he brought me out of a dark place and gave me a purpose. He was the director who brought me into the Program.

  “That’s how it works, you understand? Every director has one operative who reports to him or her. They recruit a single team leader. Then that leader builds the team.” She swallowed heavily. “I’ve said too much.”

  Ritter pocketed the badge and glanced into the envelope; sheets of paper detailing Eric Gamil’s backstory were inside.

  “Why don’t you do this?” he asked. “If I can be FBI, so can you.”

  She smirked. “I’m ronin until the rest of the directors decide what to do with me, and they’ve all gone to ground until this plays out. I’m going to lay low for a bit. My contact with Bendis was indirect, but traceable. Whoever killed him might have me in their sights.


  “Besides, the angle we have set up for your placement and access with the FBI depends on you. True name or otherwise,” she said. “Base out of the off site. Tony’s already there, setting up the tech support. Irene is under an alias at TEDAC, where all the forensic exploitation for this case will take place.”

  “Wait. You sent Irene into the FBI undercover?” Ritter asked. Irene was a brilliant analyst and an asset to Shannon’s team, but she didn’t have a dishonest bone in her body.

  “She’s a big girl. The FBI is bringing in additional analysts for this case, and her alias is airtight. I told her to keep her head down, mouth shut, and to be unfriendly. She’ll fit right in.”

  “I don’t speak FBI very well. What’s this angle you mentioned?”

  Shannon chewed her bottom lip. “Yes, about that…”

  CHAPTER 3

  Shelton jotted down the address for the house in front of him, then stretched his arms behind his back. He’d interviewed dozens of Bendis’s neighbors in the preceding hours. None had anything worthwhile to add to the investigation. The house before him was the last one before the road cut off into sparse trees covering a small knoll.

  He adjusted his badge so it was easily visible on his chest and stepped onto the driveway.

  “Shelton! Someone wants to see you,” Burkowski said as he rumbled toward Shelton. The large man had graduated from coffee to cigarettes hours ago, a smoldering butt still between his lips.

  Shelton rolled his eyes and made his way toward Burkowski. The last house could wait a bit longer. He looked to the setting sun and estimated he had another half hour of useful light left. Asking a witness to point out anything in the dark wasn’t good police work.

  “Who needs me?” Shelton asked.

  “Assistant Director Cox,” Burkowski said. He didn’t bother to match Shelton’s quicker pace as he continued. “What’d you do to get on the Counterterrorism Division’s radar? I thought you were with Major Crimes.”