As he spoke he raised a hand, and as Connor saw the glint of the muzzle sweep toward him, he squeezed off a single round. The man’s head snapped back before his arm had a chance to extend. A mist of blood and gore erupted from the back of his head.
Connor didn’t give him a second thought. He moved forward to check the cab. The driver was sprawled across the bench seat, his body covered in his own blood, and probably some of his companion’s. “Clear.”
He moved back to the cargo box and motioned to Thompson, who stepped forward and threw back the latch, then pushed the door up. Simultaneously, Duncan and Connor stepped forward, their guns up and ready.
The cargo area was filled with crates and canvas bags, all with numbers and letters stenciled in black.
“Clear,” Duncan said, lowering his pistol.
Thompson disappeared around the side of the truck.
Connor blew out a relieved breath. He turned to Duncan, who was breathing heavily, his hands shaking as he holstered his pistol. “You okay, officer?”
“Huh?” Duncan asked, then seemed to shake himself. “Yeah, fine.”
Connor nodded to the pickup truck. “Nice driving.”
Duncan laughed. “Thanks.”
“None of these guys are Müller,” Thompson said, coming back around the truck.
“He was probably in that chopper,” Connor said, letting the M4 hang from its sling.
Thompson’s phone rang. He answered and put it on speaker. “Go, Marty.”
“Annie did it! She actually did it!”
Connor frowned, stepping closer to the phone. “She stopped Hakimi? Stopped the bomb? What? What’d she do?”
“The bomb went off, but it didn’t go nuclear, thanks to her. Oh, and she also managed to contain the blast in a tunnel near the Potomac.”
“Is she okay?” Thompson asked.
“She’s a little banged up, but other than that she’ll be fine.”
Thompson nodded. “Good. We’ve managed to counter the attack on the mint, but we’ve got an awful mess to clean up.”
“I’m already on it. Did you guys find the second truck? I know the first helicopter left out of there in a hurry once the cops started showing up.”
Connor and Thompson looked at each other. Connor asked, “First helicopter? Second truck? What are you talking about?”
“At the mint. There was another U-Haul, it tore ass out of there right before the police officers started showing up.”
Duncan nodded. “There was another chopper that left right as we arrived. We called it into dispatch, but I don’t know what happened to it after that. That was around the time we started taking heavy fire from that thing.” He motioned to the machine gun in the back of the pickup.
“Dammit,” Connor said. “Can you track it?”
“I’m not sure,” Brice said. “I’m working on it now. Might be able to tap into Stewart’s Air Traffic Control and get a view of the radar data. I’ll let you know.”
“Make it quick, Marty,” Thompson said. He hung up and slid his phone back into his pocket. “How much you want to bet Müller was on the first chopper?”
“One hundred percent chance,” Connor said. He felt cheated.
“Um,” Duncan said, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything… I mean, obviously you’re on our side because you helped us stop these assholes, but… who the hell are you guys?”
Chapter Forty-Six
The next morning, Connor woke to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and eggs. He sat up on the couch he’d spent the night on and stretched. His entire body was sore, a reminder that he wasn’t the operator he used to be, and he definitely needed to get into the gym more often.
Of course, years of sleeping in Humvees and C-130s had given Connor the ability to sleep almost anywhere and in any position. He’d even managed to sleep standing up more than a few times.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Richards said, setting a carafe on the table that took up most of the briefing room. It was the same briefing room where Thompson and Richards first brought Connor up to speed on the Outfit.
Connor grimaced as his back popped, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”
“Welcome the to Outfit,” Richards said. “All in a day’s work. Time to wake up and do it all over again.”
A cold wave of anticipation came over Connor as he looked up at Richards.
The senior agent smiled and filled a mug. “You like anything in it?”
Connor shook his head and held out his hand. “Not today I don’t.” He blew gently on the steaming liquid for a few seconds before taking a sip. It was surprisingly good.
“Like it?”
“Better than the CIA’s budget coffee, I can tell you that. Not quite as good as Starbucks. But it’ll do.”
Richards laughed. “We roast our own in-house coffee.”
Connor’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“You wouldn’t believe it after the last couple of days, but there are times when we do a lot of sitting around. Couple of the guys thought it’d be a good team-building exercise.”
“Well,” Connor said, taking another sip, “here’s to some free time.”
Richards laughed. “There’s no free time for you and me. We’ve got tons of work to do. Like cleaning up this damn mess.” He motioned to the screens mounted on the wall. They featured images from the mint and the aftermath of what the media was calling “the Potomac Disaster.” Police and fire departments had the area cordoned off, and crews worked through the rubble, searching for survivors.
“You know our cover story isn’t going to fly,” Connor said.
He’d laughed when Thompson first presented it to him. Only minutes after they’d opened one of the crates in the U-Haul, revealing the silver bullion within, Homeland Security and the FBI had shown up. Thompson pulled aside the first Bureau suit he saw and explained they were NSA liaisons and that their presence was strictly classified. Their involvement wasn’t to be documented in the official report. Not even their names—which were fake anyway—could be written down. They were on strict orders through the executive branch, and Thompson even produced the paperwork to prove it.
Richards laughed as he took a seat at the head of the table and rested his feet on the edge. “Those pencil-necked paper-pushers can’t do anything without a form. You know how the federal government works—you were in the system long enough. They can’t think past their own regulations and policies.”
“I guess it helps that the forms were actually signed by the president himself.” Connor glanced at Richards. “They were signed by him, right?”
Richards nodded. “Like I said before, every president is briefed on our existence, and we always get the cooperation we need.”
Connor raised a chin at the nearest screen. It was muted, but a reporter was speaking to the camera while rescue crews worked behind her to clear the debris. “I can’t believe she survived that.”
Richards raised an eyebrow. “Who, Annie?”
“Yeah.”
“The woman has survived more brushes with death than all of the people with us combined. She’s got more lives than a cat. Thompson is bringing her here now.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Connor asked. “I saw her when Brice was talking with her. She was pretty banged up. Don’t you people have a sick leave policy?”
“Sick leave? We don’t even have vacation time. Hey, you don’t like it, you can take it up with HR.”
“You have an HR department?”
“No.” Richards grinned over the top of his mug.
“How are you guys keeping us off the record. I mean, Annie went to the hospital, right? The cops would have filed some reports on us—”
“It’s simple, actually.” Richard sipped at his coffee. “Sure, Annie had been taken to the hospital, but Brice hijacked the hospital’s fire suppression system and sent the entire place into a panic. That’s when Chris Jenkins picked Annie
up in the confusion. Brice wiped all of the hospital’s security feeds ensuring that Annie’s presence had vanished. All she was was a ghost in some people’s memories. And it’s standard operating procedure for our computers to flag any of the electronic case files the police manage to file that mention any of us. They’ll be deleted or modified almost as soon as they’re uploaded.
“Ah, speak of the devil,” Richards said as the door opened and Brice walked in.
The Outfit’s resident tech ops genius glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, is Thompson here already?”
Connor chuckled.
Brice walked over to the mounted screens and opened a panel in the wall. It folded down, revealing a keyboard and smaller monitor. His fingers danced over the keys. “I found something you guys might be interested in.”
The news footage vanished, replaced by what looked like security camera footage of a parking lot with a highway in the distance. A sign at the edge of the parking lot read “Stewart Airport Diner - $8.99 All You Can Eat Breakfast.”
“Hey, I’ve been to that place,” Richards said, pointing at the screen with his mug. “Stopped for breakfast on my way to see a buddy at Orange Lake. Great country up there. Well, when there aren’t machine guns and RPGs shooting everything up.”
“And,” Brice said, sounding annoyed, “their security system is brand new.”
“So? What about their security system?” Connor leaned forward. They hadn’t been able to find any security camera footage of Müller. No plane on the runway, no van driving through airport security, nothing. Brice had previously been more than a little frustrated.
“I’ll explain in a bit. Now, I’ve been through every piece of security footage I could find at the airport and the surrounding businesses. Whoever Müller had cleaning their tracks is good, and I don’t say that lightly. There aren’t a lot of people in the world who could’ve pulled something like that off. My guess is whoever Müller had working for him on security had installed software and network relays well in advance of yesterday’s incident at the mint. Upon leaving, they wiped everything, even the radar signature data and transponder codes.”
“Looks like you’ve got some competition, Marty,” Richards said, grinning.
Brice lifted a finger. “I said he did a good job, not a great one. My work would’ve been flawless.”
“Says the guy who couldn’t find any useful evidence.”
“Until…” Brice typed in a command. “The diner’s brand-new security system, installed just the day before. Check this out.”
The timestamped security footage played, showing traffic along the interstate. A group of people left the restaurant, paused for a conversation, then went to their cars. A red semi pulled into the lot, turned around, and got back on the highway heading the other direction.
Brice paused the video. “Did you see it?”
Richards and Connor exchanged confused looks.
“The semi?” Richards asked.
Connor shrugged. “The people talking?”
Brice let out an exasperated breath. “No!” He rewound the footage and started it again. “Watch.”
As the customers stopped to have their conversation, Brice paused the playback and pointed to the top of the screen. “See?”
Connor stood and moved closer. In the distance, a silver airplane was climbing into the sky. “Holy crap. Is that Müller’s plane?”
Brice nodded. “Yeah. I cross-checked with that local airport. They didn’t have a record for a flight leaving yesterday at that time. Whoever wiped their trail did a great job, but missed the diner’s new video security system. And for some out of the way diner, they actually made it convenient for me, saving the video stream on an encrypted cloud service with particularly good firewalls. Even I’d have a hard time breaking in.”
Richards stood and sipped his coffee. “A system the great Martin Brice can’t hack? Say it isn’t so.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t do it, I said it was a challenge. The point is, we have footage of those guys leaving.”
The door opened, and Thompson and Annie stepped in. Annie’s right arm was bandaged, and a piece of gauze was taped to her right cheek, but she didn’t look bad—especially considering she’d practically been blown to hell by a nuclear bomb.
“Annie!” Brice said, a wide smile across his face. “I didn’t think you’d be in for a couple days. You look terrible.”
“Why thank you, Marty, you’re so sweet.” She gave him a smile as Thompson helped her into a chair. She looked back and forth between Thompson and Richards. “And trust me, I’m going to be taking some R&R days. You can count on that.”
Connor raised an eyebrow at Richards. “I thought we didn’t get sick days.”
“You don’t get sick days,” Richards said, pointing at Connor.
Thompson was looking at the screens. “Oh good, you have the footage pulled up already.”
Richards threw a hand up. “Wait a minute, how’d you know about this? We’re just now hearing about it.”
“I hear about everything first,” Thompson said, sliding into a chair.
“Right,” Brice said. “So, I’ve enhanced the image as best I could.”
He clicked, and the blurry image of the airplane was replaced by a digitally enhanced picture. He clicked again, and another image appeared: a high-resolution stock image of a plane similar to the one shown in the enhanced photos.
“It’s an L-100 Hercules, basically the civilian model of the military’s C-130. Now that I knew what I was looking for from that diner’s video, I had one of our guys dig deeper into the airport’s security logs from yesterday and uncovered a bunch of stuff. Evidently not everything is logged electronically, even today. The L-100 Hercules landed at Stewart International about five minutes before the attack, complaining of problems with their navigation systems. It turned out airport security was breached soon after the attack had taken place. A U-Haul somehow managed to get through a gate to the cargo area and it made a beeline for the plane. It drove right into the back of the aircraft before anyone knew what was going on. None of the normal alerts went out because the outgoing security systems had been rerouted to a private server an hour before the attack. I’m telling you guys, whoever planned this thing thought of damn near everything.”
Connor took another sip of coffee. “It had to be Müller.”
Brice nodded. “Probably so. The day before, at the golf course near the mint, the automatic sprinkler system glitched and wouldn’t turn off. It flooded the place and forced them to shut down—so there was practically no one around. The athletics complex to the north was also shut down, because of the threat level caused by the New York bombings. When the attacks finally started, the initial reports came in from the residents a quarter mile to the northwest of West Point Military Academy. They were complaining about the excessive noise coming from the school running training ops. Can you believe that? It took 911 dispatchers about ten minutes to put it together that the mint was under attack.”
“Information only flows as fast as the human who believes it,” Connor said. “Can’t tell you how many times people have screwed up responses to critical situations because they either didn’t believe the reports, or they wanted additional confirmation before making a decision.”
“Regardless,” Thompson said, “they got away with a ton of money.”
Brice nodded. “Well, more accurately, it was gold and platinum bullion, not money. But yeah, they got away with tons of it. Literally.” He tapped in another command, and the images of the plane vanished, replaced by a bird’s-eye view of a helicopter parked in a clearing surrounded by forest.
“That the elusive first chopper?” Richards asked, taking his feet off the table and sitting forward in his chair.
“That’s right, found in a field three miles from the airport, abandoned and torched. The FBI’s forensic teams are working on the black box to see if there’s any usable information, but I doubt they’ll find anything.”
“Maybe he just got careless,” Richards said.
Connor shook his head. “No, I don’t think so, not with something like this. We know Müller’s people supplied the explosives used in the New York bombings. My guess is they handed the supplies over to Khan’s people with no preset conditions other than to cause chaos—which is exactly what they did. If Müller was here,” Connor raised a finger, “and that’s a big if, he’d want to be as far away from that bullion as possible during transport.”
“Why?” Annie said. “If I’d spent the time and resources to plan and execute something this big, I’d want to keep an eye on it.”
“It’s like a military general putting together operational orders in theater. He plans some really detailed and important missions, but he doesn’t actually go in with the boots on the ground. He’s too important. If he’s with the shipment, and it’s stopped, he’s toast. If he’s somewhere else… well, there’s always more money to steal.”
Richards leaned forward. “So you’re saying Müller might still be in-country?”
Connor shrugged. “It’s possible. If he is, he won’t be for long.”
“And none of the captured attackers from the mint are talking,” Brice said. “I’ve got taps on all of the bureau’s interrogation rooms. They’re doing a decent job —none of the prisoners are at the same location, so there’s no chance of contact between them. And they haven’t released that they have any suspects in custody.”
“They’ll probably wait until the last minute,” Thompson said. “That way no high-priced lawyers have the chance to jump all over the case. A case like this is liable to make them millions in fees. It’ll be tied up in the courts for years.”
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