18
Warrenton, Virginia. Friday, 4:33 p.m. ET.
Thierrot took the Warrenton exit from I-95 southbound and headed southeast. At the Jefferson Davis Highway, he turned right, and drove just slightly faster than the speed limit until he saw the familiar US Post Office sign on the right side of the road.
As he turned into the parking lot, he wondered how much longer this post office might be open. It had seen a steady decline in patronage and had cut back significantly on its operating hours. It would be a serious inconvenience if this particular post office closed.
He was still murderously angry that all of this rigmarole was necessary. But he was in a hell of a bind.
Thierrot parked, then retrieved a small key from his unmarked cruiser’s glove compartment.
He stepped into the building and found his way to box number 4031. He had no idea who paid for this post office box, or to whom it was registered. Were he dumb enough to be curious, he might have attempted to use his police credentials to discover the identity of the box’s lessee, but he knew that any such attempts would eventually require a warrant.
Besides, ignorance was always better. You couldn’t be forced to disclose what you didn’t know.
He turned the key, and the box opened with its familiar plaintive squeak of rusting hinges.
Before reaching inside, Thierrot confirmed the “all clear” code for this location. It came in the form of a date scrawled on a small slip of paper, just the current month along with the year 1969.
Sixty-nine was always a good number. Anything else meant trouble.
Inside the post office box was a small leather shaving pouch. Thierrot pulled it out and sifted through its contents.
It contained the usual items—a razor, toothbrush, comb (increasingly useless in Thierrot’s case), and a tube of toothpaste. The detective removed those items and placed them in the post office box, and carefully lifted the laminated bottom of the leather shaving pouch.
Beneath the false bottom was a short stack of $100 bills and a set of three US passports, each containing a different name beneath his photo. All was in order.
He replaced the more prosaic shaving kit contents atop the passports and cash, and returned the kit to its place.
Wrapped in a plastic shopping bag in the back of the PO Box was a revolver, its serial number long since removed. Next to the pistol was a cheap cell phone. Thierrot grabbed them both and slid them into his jacket pocket.
He closed and locked the PO Box, returned to his car, and drove south on Jefferson Davis Highway.
He had been gone for hours from the murder investigation he was supposedly running, and he had been ignoring phone calls and text messages from his team all afternoon. As he sifted through the new messages on his phone, he felt a gruesome bout of heartburn coming on.
Even if he survived the weekend, his career might not.
19
The Maple Center, Arlington, VA. Friday, 3:26 p.m. ET.
Sam Jameson parked her silver Porsche 911 just outside the police tape in the Maple Center parking garage. Her car turned just as many heads as her body did, and she didn’t mind. She had invested smartly, and had rewarded herself handsomely for her foresight. Life was short, particularly in her line of work, and she believed in the deep wisdom of living well, but well within her means.
They were considerable means, especially for someone on a government salary.
She grabbed her smart phone and a notepad, locked her car, and walked confidently through the crowd of uniformed and plainclothes police officers milling about. The large badge dangling from a chain around her neck stopped any questions.
“Goodness. Quite a mess you have here,” Sam said. “I assume you’re Alfonse?” She extended her hand to the large man who seemed to be in charge of the scene.
The man took her hand automatically and perfunctorily, but paused when he felt the strength of her grip and the intensity of her gaze. “Special Agent Alfonse Archer, FBI. Big-A to my friends. Sorry to interrupt your afternoon, but thanks for stopping by.”
“It’s no problem. Slow day anyway.” She gestured toward the black Suburban. “Big hitter?”
The driver’s door was open. A large man in a black suit lay on the concrete near the tire in a large pool of blood. His face was gray-blue, and his throat gaped grotesquely. It had been slit almost from ear to ear.
“Frank Higgs’s driver. We haven’t seen the senator.”
Sam let out a low whistle. “Yuck. What have you found so far?”
Archer gave her the rundown. The security cameras had been disabled before the driver was murdered, and there wasn’t much of anything caught on film.
Investigators were still finding bullets and shell casings, and they were collecting additional samples of the blood found on the elevator floor.
Preliminary results indicated the blood in the elevator belonged to more than one person, neither of whom was Higgs’s driver, and there probably wasn’t enough of it to be fatal due to blood loss.
“If anyone else died, they had to crawl off somewhere to do it in private,” Archer said.
“Quite an afternoon. Nothing from the hospitals?”
“Nothing. The 911 call came from someone on the parking garage floor above who heard yelling and gunfire. The only ambulance was the one the local cops called. Another emergency call came in at this address just a second ago, so the paramedics dashed upstairs. No details yet. That’s all we have. You now know exactly as much as I do.”
Sam liked his style. As a rule, Bureau guys were rarely excited about additional “help” of any sort, but she didn’t detect much in the way of the usual swagger in this guy. He seemed smart, competent, and bullshit-free.
“Thanks for thinking of us. I’m not sure if we’re ultimately going to end up having much to do with your case.” Sam paused to make sure her message sunk in: she had no intention of commandeering the investigation.
She registered the slight relaxation in Archer’s face, then continued, “But Senator Higgs is a member of the Armed Services Committee, and we’ll have to run that angle down. I would like to ask that you courtesy copy me on all of your correspondence and all evidence reports. I won’t be breathing down your neck or grading your homework, but I want to make sure I stay in the loop for any counterintelligence developments.”
The elevator door opened, and three burly paramedics burst into the thirty-second floor lobby to find Ian Banes, bloody and comatose, supine on the floor. Higgs was trying, unsuccessfully, to elicit a response from the flagging Banes.
At Higgs’s insistence, Paul had reluctantly returned to the covert office spaces several floors above. No sense exposing him to unnecessary attention.
“What caliber bullet was it?” The paramedic was cool and collected, but worked rapidly to establish an IV as he questioned Higgs about the shooting.
“I have no idea. There was no shortage of opportunity to catch one though. At least a semi-automatic, and maybe even an automatic. They had a silencer.”
“Not your average DC shooting. You are both lucky to have only one leak in you. I’ll ask you to ride along with us to the hospital so we can take care of your shoulder.”
Senator Higgs looked down at his shoulder, now soaked in blood. He had forgotten about his own wound in the flurry of effort to keep Banes awake and alive. He and Paul had hefted the large spy up from the carpet and into a rolling chair, then hustled him awkwardly through the narrow hallways of the clandestine floor.
They had then taken the elevator down several stories to the first publicly accessible floor in order to meet the paramedics. They had resisted the urge to take Paul all the way to the hotel lobby, partly for the desire to avoid unnecessary gawking, but mostly as a precaution in case the gunmen had lingered to finish the job.
Higgs’s repeated attempts to contact Sergio, his driver, had all gone straight to voicemail. Higgs feared the worst. “I’ve got to find out how my driver’s doing.”
�
��I’m not able to discuss that with you,” the paramedic said, “but I can tell you that there is no reason you can’t have your wound tended to now. You can’t be helpful, and you should really get that shoulder taken care of.”
The paramedic placed an intravenous bag on Banes’s stomach, counted out loud to three, and joined the other paramedics in hoisting the comatose Brit onto the waiting stretcher. “I can’t force you to go, though,” he said, hooking the IV bag into the waiting hanger on the side of the stretcher.
Higgs stood still, pondering his next move. It wasn’t a good sign that the paramedic knew right away who Higgs was talking about when he had asked about Sergio.
Then it clicked. The paramedics had arrived so quickly because they had already been on the scene. Someone else had called them.
Higgs felt a weight descend upon him, afraid that Sergio had been caught up in the attack.
Lacking a better idea, Higgs joined the paramedic team on the elevator just as the doors began to close.
20
I-395, Washington, DC. Friday, 3:45 p.m. ET.
The mess in the Maple Center parking garage wasn’t the grisliest crime scene she’d ever seen, but every time Sam saw a dead body, it gave her pause.
Many people repeated beat-up phrases about life’s fragility, but you never really understood until you’d spent some time around death. Either you developed avoidance techniques, or you embraced death as unavoidable fact.
Sam had spent time in both camps.
She wasn’t old by any stretch, but a line or two on her face were reminder of a misspent youth. She had developed a serious alcohol problem in her late twenties. It was hard to trace its roots to any single incident, but she was plagued by frequent recollections of some of the more gruesome scenes she witnessed early in her career.
A deranged young addict had murdered an expectant mother by carving her womb from her still-alive body, and a double-agent had been flayed alive, his skin stapled to a hardwood floor like a biology lab specimen.
Those images would haunt even the strongest of minds, and she had awakened many times in the middle of the night to find herself sobbing uncontrollably. She had recurring nightmares.
The alcohol was initially a salve for an overactive mind, and it cast her into a deep enough sleep to enable her to function during her strenuous days on the job. But she soon found diminishing returns, and before long, her self-medication had become a real problem.
There wasn’t really any discernible turning point. It had been a steady series of increasingly improbable rationalizations. Things like morning constitutionals and vodka-laced drinking water at her work desk had become a common part of her day.
There were many times when going to work was a physical impossibility. She soon found herself almost out of sick days, an unheard-of occurrence for a federal employee.
Surprisingly, if anyone noticed anything, they kept it to themselves. She was as brilliant as ever, maybe even more so, as the alcohol removed her natural inhibitions and her innate shyness. In a strange way, it had helped her to get out of her own way, and her intellect and talent sparkled even from behind glassy eyes.
Over time, the cycle of physical sickness became increasingly unbearable. She would fall asleep for several hours, then as the alcohol wore off and withdrawal set in, she would inevitably be awakened by the onset of the sickness and shaking.
As she lay suffering, unable to sleep, she repeatedly imagined ending the misery by hanging herself from the bannister in her apartment, or shooting herself with her revolver.
It all sounded a bit melodramatic, unless you’d gone through a serious bout of withdrawal.
Perversely, the disease was also the only immediate cure, and she would make her way shakily in the dark to the waiting bottle of vodka.
She drank directly from the bottle and fought nausea with each swallow. More than once, she vomited during her first couple of drinks, but she persevered until enough alcohol had entered her bloodstream to let her feel human again.
And the cycle repeated.
Then, one day, she decided that it was time to make a change. She had just returned from the store a little after 10:00 a.m.—the earliest time the convenience stores were allowed to sell alcohol—and had taken several long pulls from the new bottle on her way home.
She pulled into the garage and pushed the button on the garage door remote, then sat motionless as the door descended.
She let the engine idle.
She sat for many minutes, breathing fumes and contemplating whether to simply close her eyes and end the suffering.
Improbably, she had discovered in that moment that she wanted to live.
She turned the car off and went inside.
She hadn’t quit drinking at precisely that moment, but it had happened within a week.
The first four days were absolutely brutal. She had learned later that people had died from delirium tremens, the medical name for alcohol withdrawal, and she didn’t doubt it.
She was repeatedly tempted to end the suffering by taking a drink, but she knew that if she began again, she would only have to repeat all of the misery she had already endured if she were ever to get sober.
“The shakes” didn’t begin to describe it. She was hungry but unable to eat. Her limbs shook. So did the core of her body. Her abs wrestled with her back muscles for control of her torso. She lay convulsing for hours in the fetal position, sometimes retching bile.
It felt as though her thoughts shook as well. Ghost images trailed her eye movements, leaving her in a surreal Hollywood-esque near-reality.
She wished she could die, but had discovered several days earlier during her impromptu near-suicide that her own will would not permit it.
So she had endured.
As soon as she was able, she returned to exercising. She had worked out once or twice a day, every day, for over a hundred days in a row. When she wanted a drink, she gave herself a workout instead. The endorphins slaked her thirst for anesthetization; over time, she eventually learned how to summon calm centeredness without having to escape to the gym.
On August 5, it would be five years since her last drink.
Sam pressed down on the accelerator to merge onto I-95 southbound, and was rewarded with the familiar note and the exhilarating pull of the famous Porsche engine. Damn glad to be alive, she thought. Even with all its gore and tragedy, life was undeniably beautiful.
She thought of Brock, waiting at home for her, and her thoughts returned to the pleasant subject she had enjoyed pondering earlier in the day—his lovely manhood.
With any luck, she would be able to convince him to pause his dinner preparations long enough for a quickie. She didn’t think it would take much convincing.
She felt the agreeable tingling in her midsection, smiled to herself, and drove a bit faster through traffic.
21
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD. Friday, 3:52 p.m. ET.
Chaim concentrated on his breath. He felt the sensation of air entering his nose and filling his lungs, warm and fresh in the forested hills just south of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds headquarters building in coastal Maryland.
He waited.
He had been waiting all day.
Yesterday evening’s flight had been routine, and even his luggage had arrived without a hitch.
His travels had left him tired enough to sleep, which had surprised him, but he had awakened with his heart pounding in his chest.
Not long after, Farhoud, his companion for the mission, had come for him. “It is time.”
They had launched the small boat from the Grove Point wildlife sanctuary on the Chesapeake Bay, and used the small two-stroke motor to carry them the first three miles west across the water toward Aberdeen.
To ensure they weren’t heard, they paddled the last half-mile to shore. The effort left Chaim damp with perspiration. His facial camouflage paint had begun to smudge.
He had stepped off the small boat and given it a sho
ve back out into the water. “May God smile upon you today,” Farhoud said quietly as the boat drifted from the shore, leaving Chaim alone.
He carried a one-day supply of food, a sniper rifle, a GPS, binoculars, a laser range finder, and an unused disposable cell phone. Chaim walked quickly but quietly through the forest, avoiding roads and paths.
The wave of government spending after 9/11 to fortify all federal facilities hadn’t quite extended to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and there wasn’t even an electrified fence for Chaim to negotiate in order to arrive at his firing position.
The sun had risen over the bay, off to his right, and he had made a point of enjoying the burning orange sky. Would it be his last sunrise? If so, he was satisfied that his death would come in a noble pursuit.
He scanned the road to the north of the building with his binoculars. His opportunity would be fleeting, and he didn’t want to be caught off guard.
The binoculars were shrouded to prevent reflecting sunlight from compromising his position, but he was still careful to keep the lenses on both ends shielded from the afternoon sun’s rays, just as he had been trained to do.
“The small errors are the deadly errors,” Farhoud had said, perhaps three dozen times.
Movement. North of the building, on the road.
His heart raced. Calmly, Chaim, he repeated to himself. Breathing first, then thinking, then moving.
He focused the rifle’s sighting scope on the area in front of the headquarters building’s main entrance. His anticipation was rewarded when a black SUV came to a stop in front of the entrance.
Safety off. He re-checked the distance correction setting, which he had carefully adjusted for the downhill angle of his shot. The sight adjustments would compensate his aim point for wind and the distance that gravity would cause the bullet to fall during its flight.
The driver’s door opened, and a man in a suit and sunglasses circled around the back of the vehicle.
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