[Sam Archer 08.0] Last Breath

by Tom Barber

  ‘Amtrak contacted the NYPD. Rach just called me seeing if I knew what had happened. Apparently you beat up some NFL player.’

  ‘Wasn’t quite how it went down.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Better than him.’

  ‘How’d they leave it?’

  ‘Apparently he can’t remember what happened, so I think it’s being left at that. Amtrak made me promise to keep a low profile.’

  ‘You gonna listen?’

  ‘Of course,’ he lied, sticking tags onto the two wrapped gifts.

  There was a pause.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about what’s happened. I just want to come home. Doesn’t feel right being here anymore.’

  ‘Did you tell Isabel?’

  ‘Not yet. But that’s not why I called. I’m watching the TV here at the bar, Sam. Something’s going on there in D.C.’

  ‘The rioting? I’ve been watching.’

  ‘No. The ticker here says there’ve been reports of another shooting.’

  Archer froze. ‘What? Where?’

  ‘At a high school.’

  His blood suddenly as cold as the air coming from the mall’s AC, Archer saw an electronics store window to his left, the screens showing a fresh Breaking News report, a mall security guard standing a few feet in front of the window watching the pictures.

  ‘I need to go.’

  ‘OK. Be careful. And no more fights.’

  Ending the call and tucking the phone back into his pocket, Archer rose and walked over to the store, leaving his purchases behind on the table as he looked at the screens which were tuned to the major networks.

  Vargas was right. The rioting and manhunt reports had been relegated for the moment.

  Breaking News: Reported shooting at D.C high school.

  The networks hadn’t had time to get cameras to the scene but the headlines on the assorted screens and the grave look on the anchors’ faces in the Fox and CNN studios showed how serious it was.

  ‘Did they say which school?’ Archer quickly asked the guard beside him.

  ‘Wilson High,’ he replied. ‘Shit, I’ve got friends whose kids go there.’

  Knowing that wasn’t Ally and Maia’s school, Archer felt a quick rush of relief but kept watching as coverage flipped to the first footage of the report.

  A live helicopter feed showed scores of teenagers running out of a building and being hustled to safety by police officers, the situation apparently ongoing judging by the number of cops present. The black clad armed figures of ERT, Metro PD’s equivalent of a SWAT team, could be seen gathering in the parking lot, clearly getting ready to make an assault.

  As he watched, the guard shook his head.

  ‘Riots, school shootings, innocent people getting shot by some psycho cop. Goddamn society is falling apart, man.’

  But he was talking to himself.

  Archer was already gone.

  It’d taken everyone in Wilson High a few moments to process what was happening after the first gunshot echoed around the building. Surprise, shock and uncertainty were the initial reactions, many wondering if the sound was some of the older kids setting off firecrackers.

  It wasn’t until the fourth gunshot and subsequent screaming from the library that people realised that this was for real.

  Now almost ten minutes later, kids were still appearing out of various exits, fear etched on their faces as they ran for their lives, those already outside being rushed behind cover by staff as well as police officers who were still arriving at the scene.

  ‘Get down!’ cops were ordering staff and students, still unsure what they were dealing with. Metro sharpshooters were rapidly taking up positions as police officers trained their weapons on the building from behind their vehicles, helicopters circling overhead, one police and the other two from news networks.

  The priority now was to get an armed presence inside. Taking point on the walk-up to the school, the Emergency Response Team moved towards the front entrance, dressed in protective gear and armed with sub-machine guns.

  ‘Confirmed shooter with a 9mm handgun in the library,’ their Commander reported through the earpiece in each officer’s right ear. ‘Ground floor, fourth door on the right. Confront, subdue, then secure the rest of building. Unknown if he’s working alone or with accomplices. Bomb squad are on their way.’

  Breaching the doors, the team moved into the building with well-practiced efficiency and took point on the deserted main hallway, the sound of helicopters and police sirens outside suddenly lessened inside the building.

  One or two doors were closed but most had been flung open, backpacks, pens and laptops lying abandoned everywhere in the empty classrooms. The officers knew there’d still be pockets of terrified kids hiding in the building but active shooter protocol was to neutralise the threat before anything else.

  They were well aware that every passing second could result in another innocent death.

  The team moved forward slowly, clearing the rooms as they passed.

  As they made their way past the third doorway, the lead officers noticed a pool of blood seeping into the hallway from under the next closed door ahead.

  It was still growing.

  The team advanced, arriving outside the entrance to the library, the officers taking up firing positions as the point man reached for the handle.

  He twisted it.

  As the door was pushed back, they saw a lanky African American boy slumped against the wall by the entrance. He’d been shot in the chest, his backpack propping him up. A handgun was lying a few feet from him, out of reach, several empty shell casings near it, the smell of gun-smoke in the air.

  ‘Get your hands up!’ an officer ordered. ‘Get them up!’

  The boy didn’t move, his breathing ragged. Ready to give him a final bullet at a moment’s notice, members of the team kept their rifles trained on him as the same officer kicked the handgun further away and two others pushed the suspect over and restrained him with plasti-cuffs.

  Rolling the kid back, the officers saw the boy’s face was frozen in shock as blood continued to stain his shirt and pool out on the floor under their feet.

  His lips started to move, but he wasn’t making a sound.

  ‘Shooter located,’ the point man said into his radio. ‘Weapon and suspect secured.’

  ‘Is he alive?’ their commander asked from outside.

  ‘Suffered a single gunshot wound to the chest. Still alive but bleeding bad. We need a medical team immediately.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  As members of the task force started to clear the rest of the ground floor, the boy’s lips moved again, the point man leaning forward to try and hear what he was saying.

  ‘What?’

  Glancing down at the wound to his chest, the boy lifted his head with great effort and looked the officer in the eyes, trying to say something.

  But as his mouth moved his body suddenly sagged, the light in his eyes fading as he died.

  FOUR

  The manhunt to catch the Boston Marathon bombing suspects had been the first major domestic terrorism field test of a US city’s inter-agency task force, all of which were formed across the United States in the wake of 9/11. Every local, State and Federal agency in the greater Boston area had been involved in the search during those three days in 2013, the city’s public transport network shut down along with universities, schools and scores of other institutions until the two suspects were apprehended, one killed and the other arrested.

  Although the situation in D.C. today was different for a number of reasons, there were a couple of similarities. The case had now been active for three days and the FBI was leading the investigation which had originated over 500 miles to the north in Portland, Maine. Maine was in Boston FBI’s jurisdiction so their Field Office had initiated the manhunt, but after the lead suspect was confirmed to be in Maryland late
last night, that responsibility had been transferred to the D.C. Office and their Counter-Terrorism branch.

  For the past nine hours, the base of operations had been a Command Post on the 5th floor of the FBI’s Hoover Building headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Having arrived in the capital late last night with his partner, Boston FBI Special Agent Rob Peralta drank his sixth cup of coffee of the day, trying to blink away his fatigue and only half-way succeeding. He was sitting inside an office, listening to the D.C Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge of the investigation on the phone discussing the current status of the hunt with the team in New York, where the most recent shooting had taken place.

  Draining the coffee, including all the silt from the base of the cup, Peralta felt the caffeine hit his bloodstream and knew he was going to be good for a while longer. He hadn’t slept in over twenty four hours but over the years had developed the knack of powering through fatigue, a useful skill in government work. Thirty years old, six foot one and a hundred ninety pounds, Peralta had previous experience in manhunts, having been involved in the search for the two Boston bombers, but was carrying far more responsibility this time and was therefore extremely keen to ensure this case also had a successful outcome. Protecting the United States from terrorist attacks was the FBI’s number one investigative priority, and the situation that had unfolded over the last seventy two hours sure as hell qualified as an act of domestic terror.

  Looking through the glass at the work station next door, Peralta focused on an electronic map of the United States, displayed on a massive plasma screen attached to the wall.

  There were three red markers, spaced intermittently along the upper East Coast.

  Portland, Boston and New York City.

  Thirty six hours ago, the phone on his desk had rung ten minutes into he and his partner’s shift. Apparently an eighteen year old male Harvard student doing some outreach work near the Charlestown Bridge had been shot and killed with a rifle, mirroring the death of a twenty seven year old FedEx delivery woman in Portland the day before, both long-range hits, both victims hit once in the head with a gargantuan 20mm round. Boston PD had answered the call-out, but when the MO of the shooting became clear and they quickly realised it matched the methodology of the shooting in Portland, the investigation had been classed as a potential act of terror and immediately bumped up from local police to Federal.

  As the senior members of Boston’s Joint Terrorist task force on duty that day, Peralta and his partner had been handed the investigation. They’d been on the case for just over a day when reports of another shooting came in from New York, a fourteen year old boy, same level of expertise to execute, same catastrophic damage from the high-powered 20mm round that killed him.

  However, the son of a bitch who’d shot the kid had got careless this time.

  He’d left a shell casing behind, and with it a fingerprint.

  It belonged to an NYPD officer with eight years of service in the US Army, the last four as a member of a sniper team. As soon as the print had been confirmed as belonging to the cop, his apartment in Brooklyn had been surrounded, Peralta and Font watching a live feed of the operation from the NYPD’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau which was only a few hundred yards from where that shell casing had been discovered.

  The murder weapon had been found on the man’s bedroom floor, a large 20mm suppressed rifle that matched up to both the shell casing they’d pulled the print from as well as the trauma the rounds had inflicted on the three victims’ bodies.

  But the suspect hadn’t been there and hadn’t returned in the hours after the raid.

  He was on the run.

  A Federal manhunt had immediately been instigated and not long after BOLOs, aka be on look-out for requests, and All-Point Bulletins went out to every law-enforcement agency on the US East Coast, there’d been a confirmed sighting of the suspect late last night from a trucker at a rest stop past Baltimore on the outskirts of Maryland.

  In light of that, it didn’t take a genius to work out the next major city in his path was D.C.

  An order was issued from the Hoover Building, instructing Peralta and his partner Lindsay Font to get to the capital. They’d immediately left New York, taking the I-95 south and had arrived in the capital before the sun had come up, only to find to their intense irritation that the D.C. Office was taking over their investigation, led by an Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge called Sorenson. It was a high profile case which had escalated quickly and as such, it’d been decided by the FBI Director that a senior agent would now call the shots on this, an ASAC, just as had happened in Boston after the Marathon bombings.

  Since then, it had been a long, tense day. Five hours ago the suspect had been spotted again, at a gas station in Southeast D.C. and the entire area was now being swept by a combination of FBI agents, Metro back-up and agents from the ATF, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency. It would seem an end was in sight.

  But unlike other manhunts in their history, the FBI had an additional major problem to contend with this time. Catching some details of the shootings and the subsequent raid on the suspect’s apartment in New York, it hadn’t taken reporters long to discover the man who lived there was an NYPD cop. Thanks to the media then leaking the suspect’s identity, trouble started to brew in cities across the nation, people outraged that a police officer had apparently been responsible for the deaths of three innocent people. When the press had then released the fact that two of the three victims were African American teenagers, the other was a Hispanic woman and the alleged perpetrator had managed to escape before being arrested, all hell had broken loose, especially in D.C. where one of the victims had been born and raised.

  With the FBI focused on apprehending the suspect, working off that eye witness report that he’d been seen in the Southeast of the city five hours ago, Metro was providing as much support as they could muster in very challenging and dangerous conditions, sending riot-control teams to do what they could to contain the violence and also restore order.

  However, tracking down a Federal suspect in the midst of increasingly violent unrest was proving to be extremely challenging, especially now the media had released the information that the suspect had been seen entering the south east of the city. Consequently, protestors in the area were also on the look-out for him and the FBI knew they had to find the man before anyone else did. Nine Metro officers and four Federal agents had already been injured and although arrests were being made, the trouble was continuing to spread, a blue alert going out to all law-enforcement officials in the city as the police struggled to maintain control.

  As Sorenson continued to talk with the FBI office in New York, Peralta leaned back in his chair, wearily glancing at the plasma screens on the walls next door which were showing constantly changing pictures of the riots in different cities.

  Then he sat upright, frowning.

  ‘Hold up,’ Peralta said, rising.

  Sorenson stopped mid-sentence and looked at the screens.

  The images had changed.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ Sorenson said as Peralta walked out of the office.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked, joining his Boston FBI partner.

  ‘School shooting,’ Special Agent Lindsay Font replied, a tall thirty year old blonde with a quick temper, dressed in a dark work suit. She didn’t take her eyes off the main screen, which was showing a large police presence at a school somewhere in the city, the afternoon sun reflecting off Metro cars as they sealed off the area.

  ‘How many shooters?’

  ‘Just one, they think,’ she said, cursing quietly. ‘Lone black male. Son of a bitch. Of all days, today.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Looks like he was a student at the school. Metro ERT reported the boy died just after they got there.’

  ‘Casualties?’ Sorenson asked one of his analysts.

  ‘Unknown. ERT are still securing the site.’

  ‘Who do we have on it?’

&nbs
p; ‘Two agent teams and a lab unit are on their way.’

  Sorenson turned to Peralta and Font. ‘You two, get over there and find out if this is related.’

  ‘This was close-quarters, sir,’ Peralta pointed out. ‘Our guy hits people long distance with a rifle.’

  ‘What’s the current status on the manhunt?’ Sorenson asked his support staff, ignoring Peralta’s comment.

  ‘Our people are still sweeping the 7th and 8th with ATF,’ an analyst said, pointing to a grid map of the city on one of the plasma screens. ‘No sign of him yet. Metro are providing as much back-up as they can but they’re stretched pretty thin and are taking hits. Gangs who are normally busy offing each other are forming alliances to attack any cops they can find.’

  ‘Protestors out on the street are putting themselves at risk,’ Sorenson said, looking at the suspect’s photo and file on one of the plasma screens. ‘This asshole knows he’s being hunted. He could go to any lengths to escape. That includes shooting anyone who gets in his way.’

  ‘No shit,’ Font muttered, grabbing her jacket from a chair.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Before she was forced to reply, across the room an analyst put his finger in his ear to better hear a call, then lowered the phone.

  ‘I got something!’

  Although he’d only visited the US capital once before, Archer had studied a map of the city last night and done his homework on the different areas. Shaped like an angled boot with the toe pointing down and left, Washington D.C. was divided into eight wards. Running side by side in the south of the city, Wards 7 and 8 were the most deprived areas of the city, the unemployment rate in Ward 8 the highest in any metropolitan area in the United States.

  Separated from the other six Wards by the Anacostia River, the level of discontent in Wards 7 and 8 meant they were always a flashpoint for potential trouble. Violent crime was a constant problem, especially in Ward 8, and Archer was getting a first-hand look, having just been cleared through a roadblock on the bridge behind him.

  The comparison from where he’d just come from to this was an eye-opener, government buildings and clean streets replaced by housing projects, derelict properties and a general feeling of menace and neglect.