A woman said something, and the voice she recognized as the man who’d hit her in the face—he was the leader of the group, she thought—swore at her. In English.
“Shut the fuck up, cunt!” he shouted.
One of the other men said something. In English, she was sure. And she thought that she’d heard that voice somewhere. Not here, but somewhere. And that frightened her more than just about anything else that had happened since midnight.
The voices faded and then were gone.
For a full minute, Dot remained where she stood, her ear to the door, listening for the other man to come back and say something else. But the only noises were the sounds of traffic on the highway across the frontage road.
Clutching the blanket tightly around her shoulders, she went back to the window and parted the curtains. She was on the second floor, the drop to the ground not so far that if she jumped she would be seriously injured.
The window was in two sections, a latch in the middle overlapping the frame. She tried to undo it, but it was stuck in place. Metal filings had fallen onto the windowsill, and for a moment she tried to work out what that could mean. But then she saw that three screws had been driven into the wall through the aluminum frame. The screw heads seemed newer than the frame. There was no way she could open the window.
Breaking the window and then clearing the glass away so that she could jump would be noisy and would take too much time. They would be on her before she could jump.
A man in a leather jacket was pumping gas in his pickup truck at the Shell station next door.
She might not have time to jump, but if she could break out the glass, she could call for someone to help her. It wasn’t much, but it was something, which was better than nothing.
“You have to learn to stand on your own two feet, sweetheart,” her mother had told her in the hospital where she’d died. “You need to be able to take care of yourself. And that’s an important thing, especially for a woman.”
She cried. “I’m not ready,” she remembered telling her mother.
“Your father is going to be a busy man for the next two years, six if he’s re-elected. It means you’ll have to grow up in the White House with every eye in the world—both good and bad—focused on every move you make.”
“No.”
“Yes, Dotty. Whatever you do from now on, make it count for something.”
She went to the door to listen again, but no one was there.
Shrugging off the blanket, the president’s daughter pulled the chair away from the desk and hefted it so that the legs and rollers were facing the window. But the damned thing was cheap. It was too light.
Nevertheless, she slammed the chair feetfirst into the heavy curtains. It was like trying to break down a door with a wooden spoon. The chair bounced back, nearly taking her arms out of their sockets, but the thin wall boomed with a noise everyone in the building had to hear.
She pulled the curtains aside, but they fell back before she could raise the chair to try again.
“Goddamnit!” she cried in frustration.
This time when she slammed the chair into the curtained window, it rebounded out of her hands and went crashing halfway across the room.
The door opened, and the man who’d hit her before came charging in. Behind him in the corridor, a man in a dark business suit stepped to the left just out of sight, but not before Dot got a good look at his face, and her stomach flopped over.
The ISIS commander was on her.
* * *
She gradually came awake lying on her back on the bed, becoming aware in degrees that she ached everywhere. Her shoulders from bouncing the chair against the window, her ribs—at least two of which she was sure were broken—her legs where the bastard had kicked her, knocking her to the floor, and her face again from where he’d hit her in the same spot as before.
By degrees, she also saw his eyes and the set of his mouth, spittle flying out from his lips half-parted in the snarl of a wild animal. She had never seen such a mammoth anger in any person anywhere at any time, not even in the most violent movie or video game she’d ever watched.
He wanted to kill her, she was sure of that much in retrospect. But he hadn’t. At the last moment, something held him back, some bit of sanity. They’d kidnapped the president’s daughter and were holding her for a ransom that wouldn’t be paid if she were dead.
She opened her eyes and smiled.
Tarek was there, along with one of the women. “You did a wrong thing,” he whispered. “It is lucky that you are still alive.”
The girl said something in Arabic, and Tarek pulled the thin blanket up to Dot’s neck, covering her breasts.
The girl said something else, and Tarek shook his head. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because you can’t kill me. I’m worth more to you alive than dead.”
“But he will continue to damage you if you will not cooperate.”
“Maybe he’ll go too far next time.”
Tarek was alarmed. “There must not be a next time.”
She studied Tarek’s face so that she would remember it and then looked up at the girl. Knowledge was power. She knew that they would not kill her, but when it was over, she wanted them dead or in jail. She wanted to be at their trial.
But there was the other thing. The man in the corridor. His was the other voice, the one she thought she’d recognized. Seeing him, she knew exactly who he was. But she couldn’t fathom why he had taken the risk to show up here, and what he wanted.
He was working for the bastards, but she couldn’t figure out why no one knew about him, or even suspected him.
“It would be better if you let me walk out of here.”
“It cannot be.”
“You’ll all die.”
“Allah willing,” Tarek said. “But then you don’t understand.”
“Give me a fucking break. You kill innocent people, then make yourself believe that they’re infidels and that you’re doing them a favor? I don’t know what kind of shit you guys are smoking, but I wouldn’t mind a hit right now.”
Tarek shook his head. “You don’t believe in God.”
“In Allah, yes. But not in your murdering God.”
The woman was disdainful. She said something to Tarek.
“You must not talk like that. If Fathi hears you, he will certainly kill you. And he will be justified. Do you understand?”
“Sharia law. Do you people actually believe it will happen here?”
“We will not be lectured to,” the woman said in English.
Dot sat up, the effort taking every ounce of her willpower, the blanket falling away. “Is that how you spread the word, you fucking idiot? By kidnapping the president’s daughter? Do you honestly believe that he’ll do whatever it is that you want him to do?” She raised her middle finger. “If that’s the case, you people are even dumber than we all know you are.”
The woman shrugged. “Yet here you are, our captive, not the other way around.”
“For now,” Dot said. “Say your prayers, because you’re all going to hell.”
She held her pose, even though the words sounded incredibly stupid in her ears.
Hour 14
McGarvey stood at the window in the front bedroom on the second floor of the house. Metro police cars were blocking both ends of the street. A half dozen heavily armed SWAT team operators had been stationed at key spots across the street, and around back, now they stood around their two armored vehicles waiting for the orders to clear out.
Three black Caddy SUVs belonging to the FBI were parked on the diagonal directly out front, and just behind them, a bureau forensics van was running various bits of evidence as it was brought out of the house to them.
Bernstein had shown up last with Coffey and Kelley Loring, and they were downstairs now.
Only a few neighbors were out on their porches, while others were inside at the windows watching all the activity. Several FBI agents were knocking on doo
rs and taking statements.
All neat and tidy and by the book, McGarvey thought. With almost no results, except that at least five people, possibly more, had lived here for several weeks and that it was unlikely that the president’s daughter had been brought here.
Kelley came to the bedroom door. “She was never here.”
McGarvey turned. “That’s what Tom told me.” Tom Bishop was the bureau’s SAC on this part of the investigation. “But this apparently was an ISIS hot spot.”
“Can we be sure that the people who were here were the same ones who kidnapped—?” She had a hard time with the word. “Who kidnapped Dorothy?”
“No way to be sure for now, but it seems likely. We have some people at Langley who’re running the computer evidence.”
“Otto Rencke. We’ve heard about him, and you, Mr. Director.”
“We’ll get her back in one piece. They don’t want to kill her if there’s any possibility that the president will go along with what they want.”
“We weren’t told what that was.”
“Someone left a note in the president’s study. They want us to put boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria.”
Kelley’s face fell. “And go head-to-head with the Russians?” She shook her head. “Not a chance in hell he can do it.”
“Of course not, but he can buy us some time.”
“Ten hours,” Kelley said. “So what’s next?”
“More of the same. They’ve left a trail of mistakes, and we just have to follow them.”
“The garbage truck was parked at the dump all morning. The driver and pickup man dead in the back, and there were fingerprints all over the place.”
“It’s the same here. They don’t think they’ll get caught,” McGarvey said, though it wasn’t the real reason they’d been so sloppy.
“You and I both know that’s not true. They left their marks everywhere, like dogs pissing on fire hydrants. We’ll find them, all right, but not until it’s too late. They want martyrdom. They want to blow themselves up, to prove themselves worthy. It’s why they gave the president an impossible demand. In the end, they’ll kill themselves. And Fox.”
She was right.
Kelley looked bleak. Not resigned, just caught up in what she thought was a no-win situation.
“They’re pigs. This place is a mess. We even found the bottle of chloroform and the sponge pad they probably used to take her down. They didn’t give a damn to take it with them in case she woke up. And we were right there. Less than a block away.”
Chloroform was dangerous. Too little and the victim wouldn’t go under, too much and they died. Even smelling it in the air at a distance wasn’t safe. It was one of the reasons doctors and dentists had stopped using the stuff as an anesthetic years ago.
“Are you certain that it was chloroform?” McGarvey asked.
“I didn’t open the bottle to take a whiff, if that’s what you mean, but you could smell it in the cab. And it was labeled chloroform.”
“Where’s the bottle now?”
“We called the bureau’s forensics people as soon as we’d found the truck. When they showed up, we went back to the office, until Mr. Bernstein had us roll here on your call.”
McGarvey phoned Otto and told him what Kelley and her partner had found.
“I know about the truck and the bodies of the crew,” Otto said. “Looks as if they were knocked out and stuffed in with the garbage. It was likely that they were alive when the compactor crushed them.”
“A bottle of chloroform was found in the cab. The bureau has it.”
“No one uses that shit anymore except in the movies.”
“It looks like they used it to take the girl down.”
“Then it’s more than fifty-fifty that she’s already dead, Mac.”
“I want to know where and when they got it.”
“You can order the stuff on Amazon. Just show that you’re a med student or a biologist and have a legitimate need.”
McGarvey looked at Kelley. The woman had been in firefights in Afghanistan—Otto had looked up her record—but here and now she was frightened. “Check the chem and bio labs at Georgetown. They had to have been on campus to figure out how to take her. Which means they not only knew about Byers, but they knew the entire university. What was open, when it was open, and what was there for the taking.”
“They have balls, you gotta give them that,” Otto said.
“They don’t care if they get caught. They never have.”
“Just like 9/11, like Paris, like Brussels, like every other place they’ve hit.”
“This time will be different. We’ll get the president’s daughter back in one piece. I promised him and the Secret Service.”
“I’m on it.”
“If you come up with something, call Kelley Loring. She was on the girl’s detail.”
“I know,” Otto said. “And the aircraft in Morocco is a dead end. It was carrying a couple of ExxonMobil execs.”
McGarvey pocketed his phone. He took out the Band-Aid and tinfoil he’d found on the ground outside Wolfington and handed it to Kelley. “Doesn’t tell us much, except that you were right. Should help get you off the hook.”
“The Service doesn’t give second chances.”
“Let me know what you come up with.”
* * *
Outside, Bernstein was talking to Coffey behind the forensics van when McGarvey came out. Neither man seemed particularly happy.
“Nothing much of any use here,” the Secret Service chief said. “We’ll come up with some DNA evidence, but it’ll only help to identify the bodies after the fact.”
“If there are big enough pieces,” Coffey said bitterly. “Kelley wanted to have a word with you. Did you see her?”
“Yeah. I gave her an assignment for both of you. With your director’s permission. But it could be important.”
Bernstein nodded but said nothing.
McGarvey explained about the chloroform bottle.
“It’s been turned over to the bureau.”
“I’m betting it was stolen from one of the Georgetown labs, while the kidnappers were pacing the campus.”
“Okay?” Bernstein said.
McGarvey almost hated to make a supervisor look bad in front of one of his subordinates, but sometimes it was worth it even if the super was a decent sort.
“May be an eyewitness.”
But Coffey caught it. “Surveillance cameras,” he said.
Hour 15
After all the LE people—including the forensics team in their van—were gone, it left only McGarvey and Bernstein on the street beside their cars that were side by side at a diagonal to the curb.
Bernstein checked his watch. It was coming up on two. “Ten hours,” he said. He looked at the house. “We’ve been treading water so far, and it’s frustrating as hell.”
McGarvey slowly did a three-sixty sweep of the entire neighborhood. Of the thirty-two houses, seven, including this one, were unoccupied. All but this one had been empty, no furniture except kitchen cabinets and broken-down old appliances.
“What is it?” the Secret Service director asked.
“I don’t know,” McGarvey said.
Bernstein followed his gaze. “You feel something, see something?”
“There’s a loose end I want to take care of at the White House. Why don’t you go back there now, and I’ll catch up with you in a bit?”
“Goddamnit, you’re driving me crazy. What the hell are you thinking?”
“They had to know that we’d find this place. Neighbors would talk. Suspicious comings and goings. Strange cars parked in the street.”
“No one did.”
“But they can’t be sure of that. It’s one of the reasons they didn’t bring the president’s daughter here. They did their due diligence, did their surveillance, gathered their people, made their plan, and then cleared out. Probably in the middle of the night. One by one.”
Bernstein was
bitter. “Could be in the next block for all we know.”
“I’m betting somewhere between the school and the White House. The less time they spent out on the streets with her, the safer they’d be. But they had to cover their tracks.”
“Here?”
McGarvey shrugged. “They’d want to know how close behind we were. Us showing up here in force might have rattled them.”
“If you mean a rear guard lookout here, the bureau’s door-to-door turned up nothing.”
“The houses weren’t searched.”
“I can have search warrants here within the hour, if that’s what you want to do.”
“If they’re monitoring the police and bureau channels, they’d skip before everyone came back,” McGarvey said. “Go ahead to the White House; I’ll meet you there.”
“You think someone will try to take you down?”
McGarvey couldn’t help but smile. “It’d make things a hell of a lot easier.”
Bernstein gave him a last look, then got in his car and left.
McGarvey waited a full minute and then went back inside the house from where, at the second-story front bedroom window, he phoned Otto. “Any calls from the neighborhood?”
“Seventeen in the last twenty-four hours, two of them encrypted yesterday, just like you thought. But I’m not getting a lock on the caller’s location, just the cell tower it went through.”
“Can you break the algorithm?”
“My darlings are working on it, but it’s fairly sophisticated. Government level at least. The Russians are doing good stuff like this, but I’d just about bet the farm it’s Chinese.”
“I don’t get their involvement. It makes no sense.”
“Simple work for hire.”
“Expensive.”
“Big time, but the guys who took Fox were given a big budget. ISIS is making a statement. Paris and Brussels and the other bombings and shootings were bad, but this is way over the top. Right up there with 9/11. If the president’s daughter isn’t safe, who is in this country—or anywhere in the world, for that matter? Taking her plays to everyone’s insecurities. If terrorism’s job is to terrorize, then these guys nailed it.”
24 Hours: A Kirk McGarvey Novella Page 6