“Just fine. I’m going to take a walk around. Prep,” Mahegan said.
“Why walk when you can sit in a chair?” Biagatti said. She pointed at an array of monitors on the far wall of the study. There were four rows of four video feeds. Each row represented a direction from the house. One series faced south onto the front acreage and Harmony Church Road. The next two showed the flanks of the compound. Cameras peered into the wilderness, showing little more than bony trees and late-autumn deadfall. The last row kept watch on the rear of the property. The forest crept uncomfortably close for Mahegan’s taste. Additionally, there was dead space behind the garage extension. The camera was poorly mounted, he thought.
“Thanks. I’ll walk around and then keep an eye on things from here.”
“Suit yourself, but don’t take too long. Once things are in motion, I’m going to want everyone tucked in real tight.”
“Roger,” Mahegan said. He walked onto the front porch, nodded at Hobart and Van Dreeves, said, “I’m taking a look,” and stepped onto the property.
CHAPTER 10
ABOUT THE SAME TIME THAT MAHEGAN ARRIVED AT BIAGATTI’S compound in Loudoun County, Cassie was swatting away tree branches as she followed Zara through the thick woods from the north.
They had parked in a small turnout on Virginia Route 707 and walked into the woods. On her back in a rucksack, Cassie was carrying two oxygen regulators, which were shaped like scuba tanks, but about half the size.
Zara carried a portable cell phone jammer and mobile Wi-Fi jammer she called a Sledgehammer. Each of them wore night vision goggles held by head harnesses. The terrain slid by in shades of green and black. As they approached the clearing, infrared security-fence beams shone like the barriers they were. Invisible to the naked eye, these beams poked starkly through the night, white lasers etched against the blackness.
Cassie’s veins burned with the latest shot that Zara had given her. The night vision display hummed as if everything was crackling with static electricity. Her eyes alerted on every leaf blown by the wind, each sway of a branch. And a light that switched on in the distance, maybe two hundred yards away. It was a spec, but the thermal and infrared sensors glowed brightly, as if a spotlight was shining.
A large shadow crossed the path of the light. Body features were indistinguishable. Could have been Bigfoot, for all she knew. The porch light cast a brilliant, exploding glow that backlit the individual. There was something in the step that gave her pause. The professional stride. The long legs. The slow-turning head, like a raptor hunting prey. This person was a predator on a mission, dominating its environment. She didn’t rule out male or female, given what she had seen at the trauma center.
Cassie grabbed Zara’s shoulder and pulled her to the ground.
“Down,” she whispered.
Cassie never lost sight of the predator. When she and Zara lowered to the ground, they made the faintest rustle. A squirrel in the bushes. A bird alighting from a branch. They could have been any chord or musical note from the forest’s symphony.
But still, the predator’s head turned in their direction, held its position for a moment, and then continued around the target facility. The figure then disappeared through the side yard toward the front of the compound.
“What was that?” Zara asked.
“A guard,” Cassie replied. “Did you have any intel on this facility?”
“Yes. We watched patterns of life for days, once we got word of the meeting,” Zara whispered. “There is one guard at the gate, always. We didn’t see anything else.”
“Security is here ahead of the meeting,” Cassie said.
“Or it’s Resistance members protecting Biagatti until she completes her task,” Zara said.
Cassie thought about that. The Resistance inside the CIA. People so unhappy with the current president and his administration that they would be willing to die, killing him. It was nothing short of a coup. Chess moves made at every level. Was Biagatti a member of the Resistance? She had seen the speculation in the media, but was that part of a media plan to drive a wedge between the president and his senior staff? The media, after all, was an extension of the Resistance, its megaphone. So much to think about. She was a patriot. Had fought and nearly died for her country. Now, she was executing The Plan, the highest risk mission she had ever encountered. There had been little time to rest after the combat in Iran. She was nearly recovered—her physical wounds had healed just as they were supposed to, with barely a trace, save a few scars that Jake would ultimately find sexy.
She thought about Jake.
Then for some reason she thought about the Raptor in the back yard of the safe house.
Jake Mahegan was definitely an apex predator. Why was she thinking of Jake when she saw the guard patrolling the back of the compound? The stride was similar, but most military professionals had the same careful step as they patrolled and searched. She remembered Jake saying, I’ll find you.
But he hadn’t. Zara and Senator Carter had made that clear. Jake had turned on her, apparently. It wasn’t possible, though. Jake loved her. Was by her side. Fought his way into Iran to rescue her. Did just that and brought her home, alive.
But still, that was his voice on the recordings. The sound was seared into her brain.
There’s no time. She’s dead. Leave her.
Then.
We’ll just get more men killed. Not worth it.
She didn’t disagree. Though more men had not been killed in her rescue effort, the risk had been beyond reasonable. A parachute jump into the middle of Iran after the war had been declared over, but before all of the forces had received the word to stop fighting. The mission was insane. By all rights, a suicide mission. Why would Mahegan oppose it? He had always placed his own life last in the line of priorities when it came to his team and especially her.
“Look,” Zara said, distracting her from a line of reasoning that she desperately wanted—needed—to pursue.
Cassie looked, but didn’t see anything.
“What?”
“There,” Zara said. She pointed at the left rear of the house.
A light had come on and there were two bodies standing inside the house beyond a sliding ballistic glass door. Their bodies were black outlines through the sheer curtain. They were big people, most likely men, built powerfully and wearing tactical gear.
“We need to move now. The guard has swept the backyard. We run the hundred meters to the SCIF, replace the tanks, and then retreat back here. If we get separated, the car is the rally point. I’ll wait an hour for you. You wait an hour for me. After an hour, we are each on our own.”
“We’re not getting separated. But I have to say, this mission seems crazy,” Cassie said.
“It is. But it must be done. The president and vice president are at risk. You heard the Speaker. We must do this now.”
Zara retrieved her phone. She tried to hide the device inside the palm of her hand, but Cassie watched as she pressed on a new text message. There was a picture of Biagatti talking to David Patrino, a well-known attorney, who represented Resistance members pro bono. He had a shaved head and looked like a wiry cage fighter. A media darling of almost every mainstream channel, Patrino was everywhere, representing every client that the Capitol Hill Police dragged out of a hearing room. If there was any one person who represented the Resistance and everything it stood for—immigration rights for everyone, illegal-alien voting rights, threatening the Second Amendment, free college and free health care for all—it was David Patrino, Esquire.
The picture showed Biagatti and Patrino standing on a trail along the Potomac River. The view was a downward angle, as if taken from a bridge. There was very little light, but the zoom lens captured Biagatti handing a packet of papers to Patrino.
“What’s this?” Cassie asked.
“Biagatti’s last will and testament. Two days ago,” Zara said. “She’s all set for tonight.”
Cassie processed the information. Logic was a
ttempting to tell her something, but her veins burned white hot with Zara’s poison. Even now, Cassie craved the needle. She badly needed what she had been carrying in the cooler, but knew that even Jake would not be able to deliver it soon enough, even if he wanted to. Biagatti was trying to kill the president and vice president? Did that make sense? Was it so the Speaker could become president? Was she capable of rational thought? All she understood was that she had to get the oxygen tanks into the SCIF circulation system. That much was clear.
Then they could warn off the president, which brought an idea into her head. Why wait?
“Why haven’t we just gone to the Secret Service?”
“I told you. The Resistance is everywhere. If the director of the CIA is willing to die for the cause, don’t you think the Secret Service has moles? Besides, how are we supposed to stop this fast-moving train other than making sure Biagatti doesn’t gas them?”
The distant chop of helicopter blades sang through the night air. About a mile away, headlights from two vehicles turned onto Harmony Church Road. There was commotion in the house.
“Time to go,” Zara said. She waited a few seconds, then pressed a button on the Sledgehammer Wi-Fi blocker. The infrared lasers remained in place, but the technology supposedly disabled communication between the sensors and the base station located inside the house. Likewise, the Sledgehammer was supposed to have the same effect on the security cameras positioned around the compound. They would soon find out the Sledgehammer’s effectiveness, Cassie figured.
“Now,” Zara said. She was up and moving. Cassie followed, stepping through the infrared beams, feeling nothing tangible but anxiety riding high. What if the Sledgehammer didn’t work? They’d be shot dead by the Raptor and the remainder of the team. She knew how the highly trained professional guards worked. Jake was a member of a team that did precisely this type of security work.
She sprinted, feeling the weight of the oxygen tanks on her back. The SCIF building grew larger in her night vision goggle sight picture. Zara was behind her, running effortlessly, it seemed. Cassie’s wounds bit at her. The shoulder and leg wounds had healed, but the scar tissue ripped with every stride. Tears streamed down her face from the pain, a release from so much pain and rehab effort. She missed Jake desperately, but knew he had been there by her side in Walter Reed. Had relocated to Northern Virginia to be near her. She remembered his last visit, prior to her middle-of-the-night relocation to the trauma center.
Jake had smuggled in a pint of Häagen-Dazs cookies-and-cream ice cream, which they shared. They had discussed Bald Head Island, the craziness that had occurred near Asheville, North Carolina, and, of course, the mission in Iran. Cassie had helped Mossad and Jordanian Special Forces disable the Iranian nuclear capabilities, protecting Israel and much of Europe. On that night, he had mentioned something about their mentor, Major General Bob Savage, reassigning him to the area. It was all double top secret probation stuff, they had joked. Something to do with the intelligence community.
The SCIF was suddenly in front of her, interrupting her flashback to Jake’s visit, but something hung in the back of her mind that she couldn’t fully process. A connection between the predator and something Jake had said. But that was for another time.
Cassie slowed and then pressed her body into the back side of the SCIF. It was a structure about ten feet high and seemed to have a fair amount of belowground penetration as well. The windowless building had an external air filtration system with oxygen regulators lying horizontally on a rack. A Master Lock secured a hasp that locked the two tanks in place. Hoses fed from the valve in the tanks to a fixture, which very much looked like a faucet for a garden hose, located on the back of the building.
The pictures had proven reliable. Cassie released her rucksack and placed it on the ground. Zara pulled up next to her, breathing steadily as she retrieved her pistol and placed her shoulder against the wall, securing the corner of the SCIF nearest the house. She then quickly jogged to the far side and looked around that corner. Apparently satisfied, Zara said, “Clear. Let’s go.”
Her voice was mostly drowned out by the thunderous roar of the MH-47 rotor blades. Cassie used a set of bolt cutters to snap through the lock, which flipped off the hasp. She removed her night vision goggle and placed a protective mask over her head. She didn’t expect any of the poison to spray when she unscrewed the fitting, but was prepared for that possibility. As she lifted the first tank away from its curved hold, she noticed a tag that had a handwritten date of inspection, which was a month earlier.
Clever, she thought.
She tightened the valve to the off position, then unscrewed the hose fitting, heard a slight hiss, was glad she had the mask on, and then put the container on the ground. She repeated the process with the second tank. Looking up at Zara, Cassie nodded.
Zara said, “Less than one minute. The helicopter is on the ground.”
Cassie lifted the first oxygen tank from her rucksack and laid it in the twelve-inch-wide groove. Then the second. She pressed the valve connector into the receptacle on the regulator and tightened it. Repeated the process on the second, then turned the knob to open the valve for the first and the second.
Clean oxygen would now flow into the SCIF when Biagatti led the president and vice president into the classified chamber.
“We have to move!”
Two Little Bird MH-6 helicopters zipped over the house and fanned in opposite directions, conducting aerial reconnaissance, no doubt. Cassie placed the containers in her rucksack and fled to the north, Zara sprinting along with her, keeping pace. The helicopters sped a quarter mile ahead of them and then began to circle back as Cassie and Zara entered the forest.
The woods were little comfort for Cassie. She had been on enough operations with intelligence feeds from special-operations aircraft to know that the pilots and the avionics were the best in the world. The thermal and infrared sensors would cut through the foliage and find anything that had a pulse.
“We’re no match for those Little Birds,” Cassie said.
“The forest is thicker to the north. Keep running,” Zara replied. They were now hurdling deadfall and logs as big as car tires. Cassie stepped into a stream, which she didn’t recall crossing on the way down—perhaps they had veered off course.
“Wait,” she said. Zara stepped into the stream. The water was cool, flowing from some unknown source in the mountains to the west. There had already been November snow in the Blue Ridge, followed by a warming trend for a couple of days. Cassie looked up. The forest canopy was thick, the leaves were turning but had yet to fall.
“Why? What? We have to get to the car,” Zara said.
“Between the trees and cold water, we can cool our body temperature down. Maybe stay off the radar of the helicopters. We’ll never outrun them.”
To emphasize her point, the two Little Birds buzzed low, seemingly clipping the tops of the trees. They circled high into the air, their engines whining, straining against the forces of gravity.
Cassie tackled Zara and they fell into the stream, submerged fully except for the rucksack. They both held their breaths for as long as possible, maybe a minute, maybe a tad less. Zara began to struggle against Cassie’s weight, so Cassie emerged from the water and lifted Zara.
“Bitch, are you trying to drown me?” Zara spat.
“Saving you. Now shut up,” Cassie said.
She listened. The Little Birds had relocated to another area south of the compound, the opposite direction. Cassie held her palm over her phone, pulled up the map function, found their location, saw they had drifted to the northwest, which was okay because they had found the stream. She calculated the route in her mind, studied the terrain in the darkness, flipped down her night vision goggle, looked uphill, found a route, and waded through the water until she was climbing up the bank.
Zara followed her for twenty minutes as they picked their way through the forest. Approaching the vehicle they left in a gravel turnout, Cassie
halted, took a knee, and pulled Zara down with her. To the right, about a quarter of a mile, there was a parked vehicle, and it had not been there before. The road was a long ribbon of blackness beneath the starlit sky. Trees framed the pavement and the ditches on either side like a tunnel.
“What?” Zara asked.
“Car. Quarter mile. Two o’clock.”
Zara turned her head slowly, then looked at Cassie and said, “We have to move.”
“We have to deal with this first,” Cassie said. “I’ll be right back.”
She backed down the hill about twenty meters and then walked parallel to the road until her pace count approximated just beyond a quarter mile. She approached the road, known as a danger area in her Ranger training, and the car was now to her left by about ten meters. Two people sat in the front seat of the car. They wore ski masks and most likely weren’t part of the presidential detail, but it was impossible to tell.
Should I kill them? Disable their vehicle? Ignore them and try to get away clean?
“Two bogies wearing ski masks,” she whispered. The earbud radio was not secure, but she had to risk it.
“I’ll get the car and pick you up a half mile down the road,” Zara said. “If they start, shoot their tires. If you miss, shoot to kill.”
“That only works in the movies. If I shoot, then they’ll shoot. And we’ll have a shit show on our hands.” How many innocents will I have to kill? Her mission could not be more important and so she would do her duty, yet where she could, she would avoid random slaughter.
After a pause, Zara said, “Okay. Come back and we’ll do it together. I’ve got a plan.”
Cassie returned about the time she heard the Little Bird helicopters buzzing just north of the property and about a mile to their south. They had to move.
Linking back up with Zara, together they walked another hundred meters to the west, where there was a slight bend to the north. They low-crawled across the road and then backtracked toward the car. Entering through the passenger door, Cassie took the wheel and Zara sat shotgun. In her hand, Zara held two smoke grenades, safety pins pulled.
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