Looking up he saw the woman through the screen pointing behind him. He didn’t have to turn to know what was happening. The four large tigers that lived in the enclosure had finally found something of enough interest to raise them from their 16 hours of daily sleep. Each of the great animals slowly climbed to their feet and looked down from the top of the three tiers at the new arrival in their private space.
Grace had faced down countless men with guns aimed at him, jumped out of airplanes and had once run across the border from Iran into Turkey with 20 members of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran chasing and shooting at him. But he’d never faced down an adult tiger.
He reached down and pulled his right pants leg up and retrieved the small backup Glock G26 he kept strapped to his ankle almost every minute he was awake, barring showers and the occasional tryst with a willing woman. As he turned to face the cats he pulled the slide back to load the first of fifteen bullets. Three of the animals were still on the top level, but the largest one had jumped down to the middle tier and was eyeing him from no more than twenty-five feet away, its giant tongue licking its lips.
Grace raised the gun and aimed it at the majestic creature; not wanting to take its life but valuing his own life more. He wondered how much effect the nine-millimeter would have on the large beast and if he’d have time to get enough shots off before it could jump the short distance to him. They stayed there, locked in the moment of who would flinch first, survival of the fittest at its purest. He knew he would have barely two seconds to react before the animal’s teeth would find their way into his body. His finger was still stretched out on the trigger guard although he knew the threat was imminent. These animals had been raised in captivity, but their DNA still had the encoding for being killers. He felt he might possibly be able to take one down, but the other three cats were now moving to the edge of the top tier.
They stared at each other in a primal game of chicken, one where one loser might possibly be eaten. Their moment ended and the cat jumped down to his level of the enclosure in a smooth motion, defying its 450 pound weight. The distance was down to 20 feet and closing quickly.
Grace hesitated on the trigger until he knew he couldn’t wait any longer. As his finger moved from the guard to the trigger he heard what sounded like a series of silenced pistol fires from behind him and the tiger stopped, its eyes still locked with his, then its back legs gave way forcing it to sit down then its front legs buckled. Finally the large head dropped to the ground, the large eyes still trying to focus on its prey until the eyelids drooped down and closed.
Grace looked up at the other three cats, his gun following his gaze, to see them retreating to the far corner of the top tier. He then turned around and saw two park employees with tranquilizer rifles aimed through the mesh fence. They fired again, bringing two more of the beasts to their knees.
CHAPTER 33
In the commotion at the tiger enclosure next to the café, Arash Abbasi carried out his short but tense meeting with his client. As predicted, there was more work requested and his demand for more money was met first with laughter. He held firm, staring the client in the eyes without saying another word. The client’s hands finally rose in agreement. The outcome meant more than the money.
Abbasi stood and walked away, out of the great cat exhibit and exited from the near end of the zoo. The work van pulled up and he climbed in the back and slid the door closed as it pulled away.
Grace was sitting in the zoo security office with half a dozen guards lining the walls while two District of Columbia police officers questioned him about how he came to be inside the tiger enclosure and why he had a gun with him. He gave them as little information as he could while still trying to be helpful. When the cops changed positions for the third time, the smaller of the two men taking over the questioning again, the door opened and another officer walked in, spoke quietly to the men, then left. Not sure what had happened or who the man they were questioning really was, they simply told him he was free to go and handed him back his gun and the radio unit that powered his earpiece.
Once clear of the security office he turned on the radio. “Where are you?”
“Take a left, we’re on the street outside the main entrance,” Avery said.
Grace followed the directions and found the black Mercedes Sprinter and climbed in the back, avoiding looking his boss in the eyes. Avery put the van in gear and pulled into traffic.
“I’m guessing that was you?” Grace said.
“Uh huh,” Arrington said.
“Thanks,” Grace said. “We have any eyes on them?”
“The Explorer was dumped,” Avery said.
“Of course it was,” Grace said.
“Netty followed the work van until it ran a red light,” Avery said. “She caught up with it four blocks later, abandoned on a side street.”
“Perfect day to have your boss riding along with you.”
CHAPTER 34
The afternoon sun had warmed the air to the low thirties, enough for kids to be out on the playground, climbing the structures and creating new games by the minute. First they were mountain climbers, summiting the highest peaks. In the blink of an eye they were in a battle with invisible warriors, swinging their arms around in swordplay.
Next to the playground were three new soccer fields with games being played by corporate teams, likely including the parents of some of the children on the playground. The neon colored uniforms of local business teams competed for not much more than the benefit of knowing they’d played.
Arash Abbasi sat on the metal bench inside the playground fence, watching the children play. There were enough parents around that he didn’t stand out. A newspaper was folded beside him and he drank coffee from the closest Starbucks, barely stomaching the acidic fluid only to blend in. The game had changed again as his mind wandered; now the boys were spinning the small merry-go-round as fast as they could with two girls sitting in the middle.
He watched the two girls, their high pitched voices screaming in the still air, hoping at least one of them would get sick and propel the vomit out with the momentum of their spinning onto the boys. But the boys grew tired of the game and moved on to something else, leaving the girls behind.
Abbasi turned his head slightly to the right, taking in the shape of the six-story building beyond the playground with his peripheral vision. He’d counted 11 cameras mounted on the roof so far and knew there were likely more that he couldn’t see. A second building sat to the right with the same design. To the right of that one was the smaller, windowless mechanical building, which provided electricity and pumped hot and cold air for the buildings on the campus that was surrounded by large stones and a tall security fence with razor wire along the top. The near buildings held his interest because he knew they were the weak points in the system. It was the third building, 200 yards further away, that most concerned him. That was the one he needed to fulfill his contract, to get his money: the Homeland Security Building in Herndon, Virginia. And far below it, buried deep in the soil beneath the building, the Executive Terrorist Task Force control center where the President of the United States had settled in to track down the people who had destroyed the Capitol.
A mission like the one they were about to undertake would usually take months of planning, reconnaissance and most importantly, gaining access to the buildings. They didn’t have that luxury now. A clock had been started and they had to succeed before time ran out in order to be paid. Abbasi did not like having such ridiculous parameters put on him and it was more than just a passing thought to kill his client once the money had been transferred. The client had seen his face on more than one occasion and eliminating the threat would make Abbasi feel safer.
But more than that he just wanted to do it.
They would have to breach without having put an inside man in place. Usually they would find an employee to slowly gain trust then coerce into aiding them, but there wasn’t enough time for that kind of lon
g play. The access cards and random order keypads were too difficult to bypass. The fact that the ETTF was two stories below ground made things more interesting as well. Detailed instructions had been given on how the task was to be carried out once inside, but getting in was solely on him, so that at least gave him some room to be creative.
CHAPTER 35
Grace stood and stared at the map of Washington D.C. that hung on the wall of the workroom at Buzzard Point. He wasn’t able to focus on it, upset about losing Abbasi. He rubbed the bandage wrapped around his left hand. The knife had gone through clean, piercing the muscle along the strands rather than across them. He would have limited use for several weeks but should regain all movement. Netty and Holden had returned to Building 18 and there was no sign of the terrorists after 12 hours. They entered the abandoned structure and found the bug sitting out in the middle of the empty room, resting on top of a stack of eight empty pizza boxes. Grace had seen Khouri’s shoeless feet at the zoo and knew they had discovered the tracking device in the sole.
“I might have something,” Ben Murray said.
Grace turned to him from across the room. “What?”
“I got access to the video surveillance from the zoo,” Ben said. “And I found Abbasi.”
Now interested, Grace moved through the room to the analyst’s desk. “Show me.”
Ben played the clips he’d extracted from the video that showed Abbasi and another man walking through the zoo from various cameras mounted above the walkway. In one shot he saw the men turn left then saw himself follow and moments later Efraim Khouri and a tall dusty blonde man fall in behind him.
“Amateur move. I was so fixated on Abbasi that I never saw them,” Grace said. “I put too much trust in the tracker’s information and didn’t think anyone else was near.”
“Get’s better,” Ben played the next clip.
Abbasi could be seen glancing back towards Grace then stepping into the small open air seating area of the café in the Great Cats exhibit. He then walked up to a table in the far corner, the morning sun casting a shadow across the area.
“Is he talking to someone?” Grace moved closer to the screen. “There’s someone sitting at the table.”
The edge of a head wearing a fedora and a left shoulder were barely visible. Grace stepped back, still staring at the monitor.
“This wasn’t a mission. It was a goddam meet up with a client. It makes sense. Abbasi is a gun-for-hire. He doesn’t mastermind anything.”
His thoughts tripped over each other as he considered what had gone on just yards from him as he had been thrown into the tiger enclosure. The person behind the attack on the Capitol had been there and he missed him.
Grace was excited at the find. “Retrace the video back from there. Let’s find that man.”
Ben loaded the multi-camera video, which showed 28 frames in a grid on his monitor then put them all in slow motion rewind. The man at the table had been there for eight minutes before Abbasi arrived and had brought his own coffee cup. As the video rolled in reverse the man stood up and moved with his back to the camera, the wide brimmed fedora on his head, his body concealed inside a long black coat.
“We have to get ahead of him, see his face,” Grace said.
“Working on it,” Ben said. “It was right after the zoo opened and the sun was low so everything is in shadows.”
As the video ran in reverse he enlarged a second video of the man walking backwards through the entrance to the cat exhibit. The sun struck the man from behind and rendered his face into dark tones. They continued through the videos, one by one. Each time the man was obscured by shadows or tourists, and several times was outside the frame of the camera.
“He knew what he was doing,” Grace said. “Wherever possible he followed a line that kept him blocked. Let’s try the other way. Go back to the café and let’s watch him leave.”
The images reloaded and they traced the man’s steps again. The sun was higher by then so the black coat was getting lighter, but the face was hidden in shadows of the hat. As the man stood from the table, just as the light would hit him, he kept his chin down, further obscuring his face.
“Dammit, come on,” Grace said. “Nobody is that good or that lucky.”
On the sixth video tracking the man he went into the visitor’s center. Ben sped the playback up and ten minutes later he still hadn’t come out.
“Inside, get inside,” Grace said.
“I don’t have that video,” Ben scrambled through the feed he’d accessed and searched for the cameras inside the building. “It’s not here. If there’s cameras then they’re on a different system.”
“Park police monitor the outside cameras,” Grace said. “The one’s inside may be for local access to watch for shoplifters. Get down there and find that video.”
In his years with Homeland Security, Ben Murray hadn’t stepped outside of a secure government building for work purposes once, barring a team-building event his boss had insisted everyone attend at a ropes course in rural Virginia. After talking to Grace, he went to Netty and asked her to take him to the National Zoo.
The Honda Accord was filthy inside, littered with coffee cups left over from the surveillance of Abbasi’s men. Ben sat in the passenger seat, holding the door handle with his right hand, the seat belts having long been broken, as Netty drove them through the city.
“You ever want to be a field agent?” Netty said.
“What? Well, yeah,” Ben said. “Who didn’t want to be an agent at one point in their life? I never really had the physical presence for it but had the analytical down so I went that way.”
“You ever shoot a gun?” Netty said.
“No. Except for a bb gun my best friend had in fifth grade,” Ben said.
“You want to?”
He looked out the side window as two police cars passed them with lights and sirens on in the right lane. “Yeah, sure.”
“I’ll take you sometime,” she said.
“Really?” He turned his head to look at her. “You’d do that?”
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said. “Just trying to be nicer to you than they were to me when I joined the team. Plus Grace wants to make sure you can take care of yourself.”
“Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that,” he said.
Netty pulled into the parking lot at the zoo and took a ticket from the machine. It was late in the day so there were several spaces available. Ben got out and closed the door and stood beside the dirty beige car. When Netty still hadn’t gotten out a minute later he looked through the window to see her wiping down the steering wheel, gearshift and any other surface in reach with a microfiber cloth. She got out and walked around to his door, opened it, and wiped the handle on the inside down then on the outside. She tossed the keys onto the seat and bumped the door closed with her bottom.
“Are we not driving this back?” Ben said.
“It’s burned,” she said. “Used it too much already. Plus it’s a piece of shit.”
“Then how are we getting back?” Ben said.
“We’ll find something,” she said. “All else fails, there’s metro.”
They walked into the zoo to the visitor’s center. On the left was a gift shop and straight ahead there were three steps with a chair lift on the right side that led to the hallway back to the bathrooms. On the right was a security door.
“In here,” Netty said.
“Hold on,” Ben looked down the hall past the stairs then started walking. He went up the stairs and down the hall towards the bathrooms and stopped. Netty came up behind him.
“What are you doing?” she said. “The security office is back there.”
“Wait here,” Ben pushed through the door into the men’s room leaving Netty standing in the hallway. She stared at the door, hands on her hips. A few seconds later the door opened and he came back out.
“If you had to piss you coulda just told me,” she said.
Ben looked down the hall. Nobody
was in sight. “Come here,” he grabbed her arm and pulled her into the bathroom.
“What the hell?” she said. “I could shoot you, you know.”
“Look,” he walked past the two wall urinals and three stalls. In the back corner of the restroom was a dented grey steel door with scratches and rust marks and a faded sign that said “Do not enter.”
“So?” she said. “It’s probably where the janitor keeps cleaning supplies.”
Ben kept his eyes on Netty and reached out with his left hand and pushed the door. It swung open away from him then he turned and walked through.
“Where the hell are you going?” Netty pushed the door open as it swung back on her and saw Ben standing a few feet away, a stairwell going down behind him. “What the . . . ?”
“High school field trip,” he said. “Jerry Larson said he got a hand job from Melody Maddox on a secret stairwell behind the men’s restroom at the zoo. Nobody believed him. Melody was a prude and Jerry was a nerd.”
“More of a nerd than you?” Netty said.
“Way bigger nerd than me, and that’s saying a lot,” Ben said.
“And you remembered this?”
“Not until we walked into the visitor’s center,” he said. “I bet you this is why we never saw our mystery man come back out of the building.”
CHAPTER 36
The metal folding chair barely held Ormand Baasch’s six foot five frame. Across the desk from him sat a rotund government employee. A picture frame sat on the corner of the desk with a 30 year old wedding photo mostly obscured with photographs of children and grandchildren. The man’s hair had left him at least a decade earlier. Baasch watched as the man turned and used his hand to wipe powdered donut crumbs off of the desk blotter calendar onto the floor, most of them ending up on the right leg of his thick blue work pants. A nameplate on the edge of the desk said “Larry Ferguson.”
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