Hard Target

by Alan Jacobson

  “If you were in the safe, how’d you get so banged up?”

  “I stayed put to make sure they weren’t waiting around to finish off the job. There was so much garbage all around me I had a hard time pushing open the door. I finally got it open and climbed out, but twisted my ankle and went down hard, broke my fall with my hands—then all sorts of crap hit me in the head. I blacked out. Metro PD pulled me out of the rubble.”

  “Do you know who did this?” DeSantos asked.

  Meadows’s eyes moved over to DeSantos when he saw Uzi look at his partner. DeSantos repeated his question.

  Meadows tilted his head. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that? I assume the same person who wanted my PC and backup files. And, if I might guess, the same person who wanted that Russian round you gave me to analyze.”

  Uzi glanced at DeSantos, then looked at Meadows. “Your PC is missing?”

  “I’m the one who’s near deaf, Uzi. Do you really need me to repeat myself?”

  Uzi rolled his eyes. “Are you sure they got the bullet?”

  “Your concern for my health is flattering.” He turned to DeSantos. “I thought he’d ask if I’ll regain my hearing, and how long I’ll be laid up here. Instead he asks about his bullet.”

  Uzi leaned on the hospital bed, getting closer to Meadows. “Tim, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I didn’t mean for you to get dragged into this. And I sure as hell didn’t want you to get hurt. You know that.”

  Meadows looked away. “Yeah, I know it.”

  Uzi ducked down, got in front of his friend’s face. “You need somewhere to crash, I’ve got room at my place.”

  “I may take you up on the offer. But first things first.” Meadows kicked back the thin blanket and swung his legs over the side of the cot.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Going? Nowhere without a freaking wheelchair.” He pointed. “There’s one over there in the corner.”

  As DeSantos turned to retrieve it, Uzi grabbed Meadows’s arm.

  “You sure it’s a good idea for you to get out of bed?”

  “First of all, I hate hospitals. Second, if you give me a hand, I might be able to access the data that was on my PC—including the ballistics results I took from that round.”

  Meadows looked at DeSantos. “You’re all business, Mr. DeSantos. I can tell. Tell your buddy to get me over to a computer that’s hooked up to the Internet, and not to waste any time because whoever stole my PC knows what he’s doing. He’ll be going through the hard drive. And that’s when he’ll find my trail.”

  “Your trail?” DeSantos asked.

  “His online backup account,” Uzi said.

  “If it’s still there. Our bomber may try to delete it. We should hurry.”

  “Where do we find a computer?” Uzi asked.

  Meadows shrugged. “Doctor’s lounge?”

  Uzi helped him off the bed and into the wheelchair while DeSantos sorted out the wires and tubes so he could unhook Meadows from the monitors and take the IV stand with them.

  “I tried to get the nurse to get me to a computer, but she clearly didn’t understand what was at stake.” He grabbed the armrests of the chair. “Whoa.”

  “You okay?”

  “Just dizzy. They’ve got me a little doped up.”

  “If you weren’t in such a bad way, I’d say that you’re always a little dopey.”

  “I’m glad you restrained yourself. Your lack of humor might depress me even more.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Head’s killing me.”

  “Let’s get going so we can get you back to bed as soon as possible.” DeSantos gave the chair a push toward the doorway.

  “So, since it damn near cost me my life, I’m a tad bit curious. Just what is at stake here?”

  Uzi shared half smiles with DeSantos, and then leaned in front of Meadows so his friend could read his lips. “Believe me, Tim, you really don’t want to know.”

  “You said the same thing to me when you gave me that Russian round to analyze. Still sticking with that line, huh?”

  “It still applies.”

  THE THIRD FLOOR DOCTOR’S LOUNGE featured four computers sitting on a long work shelf against the far wall. Uzi pushed Meadows in front of one of the keyboards, and Meadows lifted his splinted hands. “Oh, Christ. This isn’t gonna work.”

  Uzi pulled over an adjacent chair and followed Meadows’s instructions to log into his SafeStor online data storage account. As Uzi scrolled down the list of hyperlinks, Meadows scanned the items, mentally ticking off each one.

  “Well?” Uzi finally asked.

  “There,” Meadows said, pointing at the screen with a bandaged paw.

  Uzi looked at Meadows’s hand and then at the screen. “Can you be a little more specific?”

  Meadows scowled. “Click that box where it says, ‘Select all,’ and then that green button that says ‘Download.’”

  Uzi did as instructed.

  “Where are you going to put all of it?” DeSantos asked. “It says there’s nineteen gigabytes of data. I may not know much about computers, but my former partner did, and I do know that when you’re talking gigabytes, it’s an awful lot of shit.”

  Meadows bobbed his head. “Yes and no. It’s all relative.” He pointed. “We’re going to borrow some room on the hospital’s server. I’m sure they won’t mind.”

  “Anything sensitive in here?” Uzi asked. “We really shouldn’t—”

  “Would you rather lose it? Because unless we move fast, in the time it takes for me to argue with you, all our data could vanish.”

  “Do it,” DeSantos said. “Now.”

  Meadows directed Uzi to download all the data to a special folder they created on the hospital server. The green status bar began moving from left to right at a rapid pace.

  “Looks like they’re on a DS3 connection,” Meadows said, “so this should go quickly.”

  Uzi swiveled his chair toward Meadows. “Give me the lowdown on that Russian round. Did it match the one pulled from Bishop?”

  “It sure did. One hundred percent.”

  Uzi shared a look with DeSantos. Regardless of what his partner thought of Bishop’s paranoia, the informant’s fears were clearly justified. “Only one thing bothers me.”

  Meadows’s brow hardened. “Only one thing?”

  “How did they find him?” Uzi asked DeSantos.

  DeSantos shrugged. “Good question. I’m sure he didn’t broadcast the fact that he had the stuff we gave him.”

  Meadows’s gaze shot back and forth between the two men as if he were watching a tennis match. “Will you two stop talking about me like I’m not here? And talk louder!”

  “If we were tailed...”

  Uzi nodded. “I’ll check the car when we get out of here.”

  As the last bytes of data were being transferred to the Virginia Presbyterian server, a red dialogue box popped up. “Connection to SafeStor server lost. Authentication cannot be verified. Attempt to log in again or contact administrator for assistance.”

  DeSantos stepped closer to the screen. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means we’ve either got a security issue on the hospital’s end, or...we were a tad bit late getting this done.”

  “How much did we get?” DeSantos asked.

  Uzi leaned back in his seat. “Ninety-three percent.”

  “Try logging off and signing in again,” Meadows said.

  Uzi did so—but upon returning to the SafeStor account, the files were gone.

  “Looks like our friends didn’t want us getting at your data.”

  Meadows sighed. “If they were a few minutes faster we wouldn’t have gotten anything.” He nodded at the screen. “Click on our folder, let’s see what we got.”

  A moment later, after scrolling through the file names, Meadows concluded they had retrieved everything that was important—both to him and to Uzi.

  Uzi blew a mouthful of air through pursed lips. “So who would’ve gone
to all this trouble?”

  “That, boychick, is the million dollar question.”

  “We need a cover story,” DeSantos said. “For him.” He nodded at Meadows.

  Meadows threw up his bandaged hands. “Again with the third person.”

  “You mean leak something to the press that Tim was killed in the blast. Or critically wounded and died here after surgery. We’ll need to dummy up the records. What about the staff?”

  DeSantos nodded. “Would’ve been easier at the military hospital. I’ll have to see if we have anyone here on the payroll.”

  Uzi logged off the hospital’s network. “You take care of that. I’ll get a guy over here from CART to retrieve and wipe the data. Meantime, Tim, let’s get you back to bed.”

  DeSantos pulled out his cell phone. “And a few agents to sit watch outside his door until he dies his unfortunate death in the OR.”

  Meadows’s gaze bounced from Uzi to DeSantos, his mouth agape with horror. “Remind me never to get on your bad side. You guys are very dangerous, do you know that?”

  3:39 PM

  22 hours 21 minutes remaining

  The Metro doors slid apart and Uzi walked out. He headed up the long escalator and emerged a block away from WFO. DeSantos, meanwhile, stayed at the hospital to supervise Tim Meadows’s untimely death and the secure transfer of his data from Virginia Presbyterian’s server.

  Uzi knew he should check in with Shepard but didn’t feel like dealing with the questions he would ask. Instead, he went straight to his office to collect his messages—and his thoughts.

  He draped his jacket around the back of his chair and rolled up his sleeves, ready to dig in. He wasn’t at his desk three minutes before Hoshi appeared in the doorway, notebook in hand.

  “You get my text about Tim Meadows?”

  “Just got back from the hospital. Been a bit preoccupied. Sorry.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  Uzi glanced at his clock. “Officially, he’s dying in the OR right about now, complications from the explosion. Unofficially, he’ll fair a bit better. Probably be off work awhile.” And he may need a hearing aid.

  She took a seat in front of his desk. “I’d been trying to reach you for about three hours. Where were you all day?”

  “What are you, Agent Koh or Mother Koh?”

  Hoshi frowned. “Fine, be that way.”

  Uzi looked down at his desk and shuffled some papers. “I had...a problem that needed to be dealt with.” He trusted Hoshi, but an innocent mention of his arrest could cause a tidal wave of rumor to sweep through the building—and the Osborn fallout had already caused enough damage. “I need two agents assigned to the death of someone named Danny Carlson. Shepard’s got the details. Metro PD probably caught it, but we need to take it over ASAP. Do it gently— I don’t want any hard feelings with MPD, okay?”

  “Related to our investigation?”

  “Hard to say. Could be a hit by a sleeper cell of Islamic terrorists, staged to look like suicide.” His eyes found hers. “Get me two of the best agents we can spare, Hoshi. This guy was a friend of mine, I owe it to him to do a thorough job.” Uzi grabbed for a toothpick, shoved it in his mouth. That was all he cared to say on the matter, and he hoped she would sense that. “How are we doing on Wheeler?”

  “Nothing. I hate to say it, but unless we get access to the NICS, we’re in a holding pattern. Surveillance hasn’t given us anything. We’re at a dead-end.”

  “Speaking of dead ends, anything on Lewiston Grant? He might be ex-Green Beret.”

  “Nothing more than Garza had. He basically disappeared. I put Cindy Caruthers on it.”

  “She’s sharp. Good call.” He sighed, dipped his chin and began massaging his temples. “What about Vail’s profile?”

  “Cindy’s in charge of that, too. So far, nothing on that front, either.” She hesitated. “I’ve got another problem for you. Or is this a bad time?”

  Uzi’s low-level headache was graduating and rapidly making a bid for migraine status. “It’s a bad time. But there’s never a good time for a problem.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Hit me with it.”

  “I put together a background on Congressman Harmon, then did a cross match with all the other vics, and basically came up empty. On the surface, at least, there’s no connection. Your software program didn’t find anything, either.”

  “Dig deeper.”

  “Felder and Brown are on it, but they’re getting some resistance. I hope to have something on your desk in a couple of days.”

  Uzi groaned. “We don’t have a couple of days, Hoshi. Tell them to get me an answer by tomorrow morning.” He pushed harder on his temples, but it only increased his headache. “That’s not the problem, I take it.”

  “No, the problem is that the congressman seems to be one huge contradiction. I mean, at first look, he appears to be a left-leaning moderate, I guess. His policy speeches support a woman’s right to choose, he’s soft on the death penalty, and prefers fiscal responsibility over cutting taxes across the board for votes.”

  “Okay,” he said, still massaging his head, searching for some magical headache release button.

  “But when I examined his voting record, the legislation he either authored or voted for tells a different story.” She paused, but Uzi’s eyes remained closed as he poked and prodded. “Strictly far right,” she said. “In fact, he wrote an article for The Southern Sentinel on gun control. The Southern Sentinel is a newsletter that used to be published by Southern Ranks Militia.”

  Uzi’s eyes snapped open. “What?” He leaned forward, the arms of his chair slamming into his desk. “Do we have this article?”

  She opened her notebook, pulled out a printed document, and handed it to him.

  He set it down on his desk. “Give me the executive summary.”

  “The article probably went over most of his readers’ heads. It’s written like a law review article, with references and footnotes. But the gist of it attempts to use the Constitution to justify the right to bear arms and stand up against our government should it begin to repress the people.”

  Hoshi thumbed to a page of her notebook. “And he was quoted a number of other times. Get this: two years ago, he said, ‘We can only have a true democracy when the Federal government is afraid of its citizens.’ Or this one, after Oklahoma City: ‘Sometimes a government pushes people too hard, makes it too tough for the average hard-working American to earn a decent wage. I think we have to stop squeezing the average Joe, and stop it now, because we’re going to have a thousand Timothy McVeighs trying to stop us if we don’t do it first.’”

  “We can’t condemn the guy for his opinion,” Uzi said. “Still...this is a connection. Did you give all this to Felder and Brown?”

  Hoshi gave him a look.

  “Okay, of course you did.” He rooted out a bottle of Excedrin from his drawer. He pulled out his toothpick, threw two tablets into his mouth, and began chewing.

  Hoshi cringed. “Don’t you need water?”

  Uzi was staring ahead at his desk, his teeth crunching the pills and mind crunching the information she had just given him. “So what does this mean? Was Harmon an ARM collaborator? Just a sympathizer? Was he killed because he knew something?”

  “Whoa. I don’t think I’ve seen horses leap as high as you just did. Don’t you think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself?”

  Uzi settled his forearms on the desk. “Am I getting desperate? Maybe a little. But look at the facts: at the very minimum, Harmon was a sympathizer with the militia cause, and ARM, a major player in the militia movement, is suspected of trying to take out the veep. But the plan goes south, and suddenly Ellison, Fargo, and Harmon are killed. And Bishop. And Adams, who’d infiltrated ARM.” What he almost told her is that ARM was definitely responsible for Bishop’s murder—but he caught himself in time.

  “Adams?”

  “John Quincy Adams. No, I’m not joking—Special Agent Adams. He was
working out of HQ. You’ll be briefed on it tomorrow morning.” Uzi moved the toothpick around his mouth with this tongue. “They’re getting rid of people who knew something, Hoshi, I’m sure of it. We just have to find out what they knew. What’s ARM afraid of? Some other part of their plan they’re about to implement?”

  “Who’s handling the Adams investigation?”

  “Fairfax PD. And possibly someone out of HQ. But we need someone from the task force looking things over. Do me a favor, call Jake Osborn, ask him if he wants it.”

  Hoshi’s eyebrows rose. “Jake Osborn?”

  “Yes. Osborn. I think he’d appreciate it. Adams was a friend of his.”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  Uzi looked at her. “No, actually, I’m not. Please, just give it to Osborn.”

  4:01 PM

  21 hours 59 minutes remaining

  After Hoshi left his office, Uzi leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, hoping the Excedrin would win the battle with the headache mallets pounding away inside his head. Fifteen minutes later, his cell phone jolted him awake. He rooted it out of his jacket pocket. It was Leila.

  “How about dinner at my place? Chinese takeout. Soft music, a bottle of Rombauer Zin. Full bodied, fruity, with hints of sensuous raspberries. Irresistible, actually.”

  Uzi pulled his feet off his desk and sat up. “Are you describing the wine—or yourself?”

  “I think you should take a tasting and decide for yourself.”

  “I’m there. Around seven?”

  “Make it six. Then we’ll have time for a bath, too.”

  He dropped the phone back into his pocket, then realized that the Excedrin had reduced his headache to a dull jab. He could live with that—and after the day he’d had, he could use a romantic evening to take his mind off Nuri Peled, the death and destruction of the past eight days, and the pressure that came with having few answers and many questions on the eve of an important deadline. Re-energized, he lifted his phone and began to dial.

  THE NEXT NINETY MINUTES seemed to crawl. He approved Hoshi’s choice of agents for the Peled investigation—Danielle Phish and Bob Mason—then met with various task force members, cleaned up several dangling issues that needed to be addressed, and got status reports from a number of agents, including Felder and Brown, who were less than pleased with their newly imposed deadline. Heat at the top always trickled down to those below, Uzi told them.