The Beltway Assassin

by Richard Fox

  Shelton ground to a halt and put his hands on his hips. Cox was a big name in the FBI, responsible for numerous arrests of terrorists around the world since long before 9/11.

  “Damned if I know,” Shelton said.

  His cell phone buzzed with a text message. Shelton pulled the phone from his pocket as he walked toward the command truck. There were a half-dozen texts from his wife demanding to know where he was and when he’d be home, and one text was from a blocked number.

  He opened the message from the blocked number, which read: “Act Natural”

  The command truck was even more crowded than it had been this morning, Cox’s entourage adding to the scrum.

  At six and a half feet tall, Cox towered above the crowd. His salt-and-pepper hair was so perfect that agents often joked he was getting ready to run for president. Cox caught sight of Shelton and waved him over. Shelton pushed into the conversation circle and froze when he saw someone he’d thought was gone from his life forever.

  Eric Ritter, an FBI badge hanging from his neck, stood next to Assistant Director Cox. Ritter nodded along to Cox’s words, which were lost to the stunned Shelton. Ritter cast a glance at Shelton and winked.

  “Agent Shelton, glad you made it here,” Cox said. The tall man wrapped an arm around Shelton’s shoulders and guided him over toward Ritter. Cox had a gentle air to him, which was at odds with the stony grip he kept on Shelton.

  “Shelton, this is Agent Gamil,” Cox said, nodding toward Ritter. “Gamil is out of our Jordan office and is one of our most knowledgeable agents on all things al-Qaeda.”

  Ritter held out his hand to Shelton. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  Shelton felt anger simmer in his heart. He’d known Ritter for years. Known him during their first deployment to Iraq in 2004. Known him between deployments and known him since Ritter helped recover two soldiers al-Qaeda had kidnapped during their last tour in Iraq. Their last parting, when Shelton had confronted Ritter with evidence that he’d murdered an Iraqi ally, had been anything but amicable. Shelton knew for damn sure that Ritter wasn’t “Agent Gamil.”

  He shook Ritter’s hand and squeezed it so hard, Ritter’s lip twitched.

  “Same,” Shelton said. This wasn’t the time to confront Ritter about his false identity; for all he knew, Cox was in on it.

  “Gamil’s been overseas and undercover for the last decade,” Cox said. “He knows terrorist bomb-making techniques backwards and forwards, but he needs a partner who knows the area and the ins and outs of the analysis side of the agency. We’re lucky he was back in the States for leave when this crime happened. You’re partnered with him for the rest of this investigation,” Cox patted Shelton on the shoulder.

  “I want you two to look at this case from the outside and use your Iraq War experiences to guide you. You two are independent from the rest of the investigation. Interact with the rest of us when you need to. Got it?” Cox squatted down to put his eyes level with Shelton’s.

  “Yes, sir,” Shelton said. He wasn’t too far removed from army life to question orders from a superior, and challenging Ritter’s identity right then and there struck him as a bad idea.

  “Shall we?” Ritter pointed through the crowd and back to the last house Shelton had been about to canvas before the interruption.

  Shelton, his face rigid and hands clenched, walked the opposite direction from what Ritter had indicated and moved at a quick step past the police cordon. He strode to his car and opened the passenger-side door. He stared daggers at Ritter, then got in on the driver’s side.

  Shelton sat in the car, his hands white-knuckle tight on the steering wheel.

  Ritter sat in the passenger seat and closed his door.

  “Explain,” Shelton said, his word tinged with rage.

  “Nice to see you too. How’re Mary and the girls?” Ritter asked, his fingers drumming on his lap.

  “You are not an FBI agent. What are you doing here, and what do you want with me?” Shelton said.

  Ritter’s fingers ceased drumming.

  “I’m here to solve this case, and you’re going to help me. We have intelligence that the bomber might be an al-Qaeda terrorist who earned his stripes in Iraq. I can’t be bothered with trivial matters like testifying in court or due-process nonsense. So you’re here in case that’s needed,” Ritter said, a slight smile on his lips.

  “If you think I’m going to let you masquerade as an officer of the law and screw up this case, you’re—”

  “Let me tell you exactly what’s going to happen, Greg.” Ritter’s voice and demeanor went from friendly to menacing in a heartbeat. “You’re going to do exactly what I say, or things will go very wrong in your life.”

  “Fuck off.” Shelton opened his door.

  “Don’t you remember our deal?” Ritter said. “You keep your mouth shut about what I did in Iraq, and me and my organization will keep you comfortable.”

  Shelton closed his door.

  Ritter’s voice calmed. “You know how you left Iraq. Two of your soldiers were kidnapped—an embarrassment to the chain of command and the army. You got a horrible evaluation of your time in command that would guarantee you’d never be promoted in the army again. Then an FBI recruiter calls you and talks up being an agent. You apply and are accepted into the program in less than a month—something of a miracle in the FBI’s hiring process. You get through Quantico, then get your first choice of assignment, even though you weren’t the top of your class. It never occurred to you that all this was a bit convenient? We made that happen for you, and we can unmake it in a heartbeat.”

  Shelton fumed and looked away from Ritter.

  “Your silence bought your success. Now we require your cooperation. Ready to get to work?” Ritter asked.

  Shelton ruminated on Ritter’s revelation. His easy transition from the army to the FBI had struck him and others as fortuitous but never as a handout. He’d worked like as hard at the FBI academy as he had to get through West Point. He’d earned his badge; that wasn’t something Ritter could take credit for.

  In Iraq Ritter had manipulated him into keeping torture and murder silent. Even if the victims were terrorists responsible for the death of his men, what had happened was an injustice. As an officer of the law, Shelton knew he had the chance to see justice done. He decided to bring Ritter to account…when he had an airtight case. Working with Ritter on this case could give him the evidence he needed.

  Shelton brandished a finger at Ritter. “We make an arrest in this case. Then you disappear, and we’re even.”

  Ritter laughed. “Greg, you’re adorable. I’m not one for ‘arresting.’ I’m in the ending business. But maybe we can do something as pedestrian as a trial, if needed. Just know I will never testify in a court.”

  Keep saying that, you smug bastard, Shelton thought.

  “Shall we get back to work?” Ritter asked.

  Shelton left the car and strode toward the last house left to canvas.

  “What have you learned?” Ritter asked as he walked beside Shelton.

  “Victim’s garbage can exploded while he was moving it. No evidence of a trigger or switch found at the scene, which is curious,” Shelton said. “The explosive used isn’t very shock sensitive. He could have hit the can with a bus, and it wouldn’t have gone off. No disturbance trigger either.”

  “A bomb like that wouldn’t go off by accident. How did the bomber set it off?” Ritter asked. They passed the crime scene; Ritter craned his head to examine it as they passed by. His head swung around, taking in the entire neighborhood before focusing on the wooded knoll at the end of the road.

  “I have a working idea but nothing to confirm it,” Shelton said.

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” Ritter said.

  Shelton took out his notebook as he approached the last house on the street. Through the shattered windows, he heard the scrape of broken glass moving across wooden floors.

  Shelton gave Ritter a hard look. “If I tell you, y
ou might influence a prospective witness. Watch and learn how to gather information without ripping out fingernails.”

  “I’m more of a kneecap man,” Ritter said, Shelton wasn’t sure of that was an admission or a joke.

  Shelton shook his head and knocked on the door. A moment later a harried-looking woman with long, dark hair answered the door.

  “What?” she asked. She had a dustpan in a well-manicured hand. Her outfit of yoga pants and a pristine college sweatshirt didn’t strike Shelton as what this woman normally wore to clean the house, if she did that at all.

  “Ma’am, I’m Agent Greg Shelton with the FBI. Can I ask you a few questions?” Shelton smiled. A warm demeanor went a long way with stressed-out witnesses.

  “Fine, whatever. I’m Mary,” she said.

  “Mary, did you hear or see anything strange this morning?” Shelton asked.

  “You mean, besides the giant explosion that blew out my windows?” she rolled her eyes at Shelton.

  “Besides that, yes,” Shelton said.

  Mary sucked on her bottom lip and looked toward the wooded knoll. She raised the dustpan and waved it in the air, fanning toward the small hill. “Right before the boom, I swear I heard a gunshot. Sometimes we get hunters in the woods, and those idiots will try to murder something. I went to the HOA about it, but they’re a bunch of worthless morons.”

  “How many gunshots?” Ritter asked.

  “Just one, then the boom. It was really close, too. No echo like I normally hear,” Mary said.

  ****

  Ritter feigned interest as Shelton kept up the questions. With daylight fading, he decided to take the initiative. He tapped Shelton on the shoulder and walked off. He trotted across Mary’s lawn and into the trees beyond her property line. The knoll climbed fifteen feet high, which was steep enough to dissuade the average American. Ritter turned around and looked at the crime scene; he had a clean line of sight from the hill to the blast seat.

  He made his way to the top of the hill with a few long steps and crouched behind a tree trunk. He scanned the surrounding forest, looking for anything and anyone.

  One squirrel chased another up a pine tree, both chattering at each other. He saw an asphalt trail at the base of the slop leading to his perch, well over a hundred yards away. A pair of bicyclists in spandex rode through the forest on the trail. Ritter could barely hear the click-click-click of the spokes through the sound of the breeze wandering through the bare branches of the forest.

  He took in a deep breath through his nose and caught the smell of something unusual: bleach. The wind changed, and he lost the scent. He stood up and walked along the ridge of the knoll, his eyes scanning the ground.

  The smell of bleach returned after he traveled a few yards. He stopped, looked around, and spotted a beaten patch of dead grass just off the ridgeline.

  “There we go,” he said.

  The sound of grunts and heavy feet in the brush came from behind him, Shelton making his way toward Ritter.

  “Care to explain why you left your part—me alone back there?” Shelton asked.

  “You’re a big boy, Greg. You couldn’t handle her?” Ritter turned his attention back to the ground between him and the patch of grass.

  “FBI agents are never alone when interviewing a witness. Battle-buddy rule is in effect just like an infantryman on patrol,” Shelton said. He tromped up to Ritter and ran into Ritter’s extended hand.

  “Don’t. The shooter was over there. There should be a shell casing in the grass,” Ritter said.

  “Shooter?”

  Ritter saw a glint in the grass and crept toward it. “There.”

  He pulled a pen from his coat and removed the cap. He knelt in the cold, congealed soil and scooped up a bullet casing with the cap.

  The casing, a light-green sheen on the copper body, was the size of his pinky finger. Ritter recognized it as either a .308 or a 7.62mm round. The differences were miniscule, but they could mean the difference between a shooter who’d used a rifle from Walmart or from a specific country’s armory. A ballistics analyst could find those answers, and Ritter had access to the best in the world through the fake badge around his neck and Shelton’s cooperation. Ritter inhaled slowly and brought the casing closer to his nose. There was a faint acrid smell; this round had been fired in the last several hours.

  Ritter heard the snap of a latex glove. Shelton proffered a small paper bag to Ritter with a gloved hand. Ritter dropped the casing in the bag.

  “You have no idea how to handle evidence,” Shelton said.

  “At least I can find it,” Ritter shot back. He looked up at the bruised purple clouds, which hung low in the sky; he didn’t need a forecaster to know rain was imminent. “Hurry, find the other casing.”

  “How do you know there’s another one?” Shelton asked.

  “Your witness heard one distinct shot. That didn’t set off the bomb, so there must have been another shot,” Ritter said. He stepped toward the firing position and searched the ground around him.

  Shelton followed suit. He stopped two steps later and sniffed the air. “You smell that?”

  “Bleach. The shooter sprayed down his firing location to ruin any DNA evidence,” Ritter said.

  “I’m not following how a bullet is supposed to—”

  “Stop!” Ritter shouted.

  Shelton froze in place, one foot inches above the ground.

  “Move your right foot to the side,” Ritter said.

  Shelton complied and saw another bullet casing. He picked it up with his own pen cap and put it in a separate paper sack.

  “How’d you guess a bullet triggered the bomb? And how is that even possible?” Shelton asked.

  “After our parting, I went to Mosul to deal with an IED cell that was too effective for their own good. Local army unit kept getting hit on one particular spot, but there were no triggers—no cell phones, garage door openers, command wires. Nothing to set off the device,” Ritter said. “Reason we couldn’t find the trigger was because there was no trigger as part of the device.

  “We didn’t figure that out until we called in a Navy SEAL sniper team to support a sweep and clear. The SEAL took out a hajji sniper during the operation. Turns out that hajji had a bead on an intersection where we found fifty kilos of homemade explosives in a water can but no trigger. The sniper was setting the bombs off by shooting them. All the electronic countermeasures we had against radio and cell phone triggers were useless,” Ritter said.

  “Have you ever heard of Tannerite? It’s an exploding target, a binary explosive made from ammonium nitrate and aluminum. Sounds like what we’re dealing with,” Shelton said.

  “Is it hard to get?” Ritter asked. The scarcer it was, the easier it would be to track.

  “No, you can get it on Amazon, eBay, whatever. Besides, we could get the ammonium nitrate from cold packs without any trouble,” Shelton said.

  Ritter frowned. Chasing down the explosive used would be futile and didn’t answer a pressing question. “Why go through that kind of trouble of using a bullet to set off a bomb when the victim doesn’t have jammers around him?” Ritter asked.

  “Evidence, Eric. The perp doesn’t want to leave any evidence behind,” Shelton said. He took out a small digital camera from his coat and started taking pictures of the area.

  “But the shell casings,” Ritter said. “He had to get the hell away from here after the bomb goes off, so those got left behind. This is a gated community. Anyone drive out after the explosion?”

  “No, the community keeps video record of when the gates open and close, so our bomber probably knew that,” Shelton said.

  Ritter pointed to the asphalt path in the distance. “Where does that go?”

  “That is the Washington and Old Dominion trail, an old railroad line a bunch of tree huggers turned into a nature walk. It runs from Purceville to the east clear into Arlington, forty five miles long.”

  “He got in and out on bicycle. Smart,” Ritter sai
d. “Carry the disassembled rifle in a backpack.” He made his way to the beaten grass, where the sniper had lain, and poked at the ground with the tip of his foot. He knelt down and moved a grass-covered potato sack lying over a small depression in the ground. “He put the explosives here beforehand. The rifle and the bomb were too much to carry at once.”

  Ritter looked toward the crime scene. “That’s about…three hundred yards from here?”

  “About. Not a hard shot for a trained marksman. Everyone who’s ever put on a military uniform has been trained to make a shot that far out,” Shelton said. “Lots of preparation for this crime. No way was the victim chosen at random. What do you know about him?”

  Ritter stood up and knocked the dirt from his knees. “Just the basic bio details.”

  “So a bomb goes off in Ashburn, and whoever the hell you work for just sends you over for shits and giggles?” Shelton crossed his arms across his chest.

  Cold dollops of rain fell. Drops hit Ritter on the head, cold enough to waver on the border of rain and sleet. The rain fell harder, sucking the heat from Ritter’s body as it soaked through his coat.

  “The bomber—we think we’ve seen him at work before in Israel and Gaza,” Ritter said. “Same M-O. If we can determine it’s him, then we have more options for dealing with him.”

  Shelton wrapped the two paper bags in a plastic bag and jammed the package under his coat. His breath turned to mist as the air temperature plummeted.

  “Let’s get this over to the command truck for processing,” Shelton said. He made his way to an easy slope down and around the hill, then ran into Ritter’s outstretched arm.

  “No, we keep this close to the vest,” Ritter said.

  Shelton smacked Ritter’s hand away and snarled, “I have a protocol—”

  “You have precisely nothing to do beyond what I say,” Ritter said. “Your buddies around the coffeepot will go screaming after any lead they get, good or not. We’ll take this in for analysis and share if we need to.”

  “This is the first piece of evidence we have that might lead somewhere, and you want to hide it?” Shelton shook his head in disbelief.

  “Might being the magic word,” Ritter said. “Let’s get this to the lab and see where it leads.”