Double Crossfire

by Anthony J. Tata

  “Twinkie’s only been with me a few weeks, I’m sure she’ll be fine. Anyway, why are you making such a big deal out of going in the SCIF?” Vice President Grainger asked. “Three feet are separating us from that room. What danger is in there that isn’t out here?”

  “That’s an excellent question. Twinkie is your gal. She should answer it,” Mahegan said. “You may remember that Senator Hite is dead. That’s open-source information, so we discuss it here. What’s not open source, but most likely still not classified, is that Director Biagatti had an attempt on her life last night. The Senate pro tem is killed and a few months later the director of the CIA is attacked. Maybe I’m just paranoid, or maybe there’s a connection.”

  What Owens had found at the back of the SCIF didn’t necessarily surprise Mahegan, mainly because the world seemed to be getting crazier with each passing day. Since he left the military, all he had seen were secret plots, conspiracies, and threats against the nation, large and small. They had seen Cassie and another woman jogging toward the home, and then a few minutes later jogging away. Earlier, several female assassins had attacked Biagatti. Was the Resistance employing a new brand of assassin? Women only? If so, why?

  Mahegan was unsure if Biagatti was a member of the Resistance. There was no guarantee, of course, because the entire attack might have been staged. The embeds were deep and high level. As the president’s reelection numbers looked decent, the Resistance had moved into its Direct Action stage, which meant that they were closing in on the objective. No life was too special, too sacred, to spare. Like the final assault up the hill. Robert E. Lee ordering Pickett on the third day at Gettysburg. Or General Santa Anna ordering the final assault on the Alamo. Pick your history. The differences were that stark. Lose or win. Everything exposed. Three years of preparation and taking no chances at losing the next election.

  The president shrugged his shoulders and said, “Alright, Vance and Twinkie, why don’t the two of you go ahead and clear the room for your principals? Make Mahegan here happy,” the president said.

  “Sure thing,” Vance said. He stepped forward. Twinkie didn’t move. Vance’s hand was on the door handle. It was a sleek latch with polished chrome. Vance’s large hand pulled on the grip, which broke the seal of the metal and the rubber grommet that ran the length of the doorjamb. Mahegan stared at Twinkie and Vice President Grainger. Neither was moving.

  “What’s the matter, Twinkie?” Mahegan asked.

  She stepped closer to the vice president. President Smart looked at them and said, “Twinkie, get in there with Vance. Be a wingwoman.”

  Twinkie shifted, shuffled her feet, and looked down at the floor. The vice president nudged her, saying, “Go ahead, Twinkie. Go with Vance.”

  Twinkie’s head snapped up and she looked at the vice president. “But, sir . . .”

  “Get in there!” the vice president roared.

  Vance still was holding the door handle. Some air was slipping between the SCIF and hallway. The vice president eyed the minor gap nervously. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” Smart asked. He looked from Grainger to Twinkie to Mahegan.

  President Smart didn’t know him well, but Mahegan figured he knew of him. Mahegan’s name had probably been in the president’s briefing book on several occasions. Mahegan made problems disappear. A president had to like that. Though one could also assume that Mahegan might be a part of the problem and not the solution.

  Mahegan looked at Vance’s hand on the door, then caught Vance’s eyes, which were staring back at Mahegan with a knowing look. Mahegan nodded. This was the moment that everything had to go right down to the very last detail, which almost never happened even on the best, most precisely executed operations.

  “You open that door, one of two things will happen,” Mahegan said.

  “What’s that?” Smart asked. Biagatti’s stare burned holes in Mahegan’s face, like lasers.

  “Not to overstate the obvious, but you either live or die,” Mahegan said.

  “Are you threatening the president and vice president of the United States?” Grainger challenged, recovering from whatever was bothering him. Still, perspiration was beading on his shiny forehead. Twinkie was still shuffling her feet. “I’m happy to walk in there if Director Biagatti says it’s okay,” she said.

  “No, sir. Just stating a fact,” Mahegan said. “The Resistance is in direct attack mode. Earlier I walked into a raid on Director Biagatti’s house. Even your Secret Service teams have been compromised. Embeds are everywhere. There’s a coup happening. I’m what you’ve got. If Vance and Twinkie clear the room, then I’d say you’re fine.”

  “A coup?” the vice president protested. “That’s just insane.”

  “Perhaps,” Mahegan said. “It’s hard to tell, but Director Biagatti here probably could tell you best.” As Biagatti began to talk, a thought lodged in Mahegan’s mind. Something he had cycled through only moments earlier. Something about the Resistance and women attacking Biagatti’s house. He listened to Biagatti as he grappled to synthesize the complete idea.

  “There has been chatter, but you know we are limited in our ability to collect on U.S. citizens in the United States—the whole purpose behind meeting here. As far as embeds, or moles, or whatever you want to call them, they’re real, no doubt about that. The problem is smoking them out. You have those that remained from the previous administration that were downgraded into protected federal bureaucrat positions. Nothing you can do about them. They start out as political hires, and then when the previous administration sees its party has lost, they execute a plan that embeds holdovers in every agency. The Resistance has access to top secret, comparted information every day, all day. They have members in the Secret Service and they have members in my organization. D-day has arrived for them and they are executing.”

  “What kind of chatter?” the vice president asked. Maybe it was Mahegan, but the man appeared to be unreasonably nervous.

  “If we’re not going in the SCIF, I’d recommend we walk toward the front of the house as we continue this conversation,” Mahegan said. “Based on what Director Biagatti is saying, that twenty percent of the administration might be Resistance, out of the six of us, there’s a probability that one is a member of the Resistance.”

  “I’d say you’re being insubordinate, Mahegan,” President Smart said.

  “Maybe, but I’d rather ruffle a few feathers and call it as I see it, to do my job, which is protecting you, primarily,” Mahegan said. He nodded at the president. The president gauged him for a moment.

  “Okay. Seems like we’re not going in the SCIF. We’re already discussing classified information. Wouldn’t be the first time we didn’t do so in a SCIF. Mahegan, you’re in charge of this gaggle. Let’s go,” Smart said.

  As the president was turning to follow Mahegan, Grainger retrieved a pistol from a holster beneath the left side of his jacket.

  Mahegan didn’t move with the momentum of the group. He watched the vice president level his pistol at Twinkie at the same time Mahegan had his Tribal Sig Sauer out and up and aimed at the vice president. Vance shut the SCIF door and tackled the president to get him out of the line of fire and leveled his pistol at Mahegan.

  “Don’t do it, Jake,” Biagatti said. “You’ll be killing the vice president of the United States.”

  “Shut up!” Grainger said. “Nobody’s killing me. Twinkler here is a Resistance member. She’s got two assassins at my home right now, ready to kill my wife and children. I’ve been suspecting her for a few weeks. She’s been sneaking off for private conversations. I started carrying my own pistol, in case she made a move against me in the next forty-eight hours. And now she’s wired with a suicide vest.”

  That’s why she looks so blocky, Mahegan thought. His mind raced. The scene was insane. Vance was now up and running through the hallway toward the kitchen as he shielded the president with his considerable mass. Biagatti was frozen in place, looking at the vice pres
ident with a pistol to the head of his bodyguard.

  “So, is it true, Twinkie? Are you in on the Resistance?” Mahegan asked.

  Twinkie didn’t respond. She was catatonic, probably wondering how the evening had gone so wrong. Her lips then spread into a thin smile as she slowly moved her fingers toward her wrist. The movement was almost imperceptible, but Mahegan had seen that façade on suicide bombers before. The look was one of serene commitment—a woman at peace with what she was less than a second from doing. The vice president wasn’t positioned to see the distant stare or the nearly imperceptible movement of Twinkie’s hand. Director Biagatti was too busy staring at the pistol Grainger held to Twinkie’s head to notice the guard’s intent.

  Vance shouted over his shoulder as he pushed the president and ran, “Bomb! Come with me, Vice President!”

  Mahegan quickly snapped off two rounds into Twinkie’s forehead, then opened the door, tackled Biagatti and fell into the SCIF, pulling the door shut behind him. Grainger had tripped backward as Twinkler’s body fell into him.

  Mahegan and Biagatti lay on the SCIF floor, keeping low to avoid any penetrating shrapnel. There was a pregnant pause, extended and drawn out. Was the bomb going to explode?

  “What the hell is going on, Jake? We can’t be in here!” Biagatti said.

  Her eyes were wide, a frightened animal. But Mahegan registered no apparent concern about Biagatti. She looked over her shoulder at the back wall, like a smaller animal fearing a predator. Noises in the hallway caused her to look back toward the door.

  No way is Twinkler still alive, Mahegan thought. That better be Hobart and Van Dreeves. Is 60 seconds enough time to do what they need to do?

  What was probably a minute, maybe slightly more seemed like five minutes. After a few more noises in the hallway, an explosion rocked the SCIF, shrapnel piercing the walls and whizzing above their heads. Fire licked inward like a serpent’s tongue, quickly receding. Smoke filled the SCIF with the acrid chemical stench of spent urea nitrate.

  Mahegan was quickly up, pulling at Biagatti, who appeared okay.

  “What the hell?” She looked up at the vents in the SCIF ceiling. “We have to get out of here!”

  Mahegan nodded. “Just a few more seconds. Make sure there are no secondaries.”

  “Now, Jake! We can’t stay in here!” Then after a pause, she gathered herself, calmed her emotions. “We have to find the president and vice president.”

  Mahegan said nothing, kept his arm over Biagatti, pinning her to the floor. She was wriggling to escape his clutch, fearful of something, perhaps because Mahegan had said it was unsafe in the SCIF. After another minute, he stood and assisted her, but she stayed in a low, crouching position, covering her mouth against the smoke filling the SCIF and the hallway connecting the kitchen and the SCIF.

  “Follow me,” Mahegan said. The door had buckled inward and it took Mahegan placing his foot against the frame of the SCIF wall to pry it open against its seared hinges. Smoke continued to suck into the SCIF, pulled by the HVAC filter system Mahegan had turned on after being debriefed by Owens.

  Stepping into the hall, he looked to his right and saw the mangled remains of Twinkler and what appeared to be Vice President Grainger. Smoke boiled in the hallway, obscuring everything. The scene was such that Grainger had never reached Vance, Twinkler somehow blocking his egress in her death. Not much was left intact of either body. Being that close to a bomb blast shredded body parts, leaving a leg here, an arm there, faces completely unrecognizable. Pieces of the vice president’s bomber jacket littered the hallway like confetti. Anyone looking at the scene would assume the Vice President died next to his secret service agent.

  “You let the vice president be killed!” Biagatti shouted.

  “No. I saved you. Whether you’re worth saving, now there’s a real question.”

  “Savage warned me about you, Mahegan.”

  “Good. Glad there weren’t any false expectations.”

  They raced along the hallway, where Vance was kneeling over another unrecognizable body, whose face he had already covered. The bomber jacket was shredded in the back and the scene gave the appearance that when Vance had stepped forward to open the door for the president, the bomb exploded, and shrapnel cut into the president.

  Vance was staring at the dead man, pressing his hand against the mangled neck.

  “I was supposed to protect the president,” Vance muttered. “I’m just . . . lost, man.”

  “Call an ambulance,” Biagatti said. “Now!”

  “We can’t do that,” Mahegan said. “We’ll have to put them all on the helicopter. It will be more discreet and much faster.”

  Smoke hung in the hallway like a lingering ghost, leering at the destruction. Biagatti was oddly sanguine, now that she was out of the SCIF and in the smoky hallway, though she cast a skittish glance over her shoulder.

  “Dead?” she asked.

  Vance looked up and nodded, eyes moist.

  “Director, why don’t you link up with the team in the study. We will move out from there,” Mahegan said.

  Biagatti nodded, coughed, and said, “Okay.” She stepped past Mahegan, over what appeared to be the president’s body, and beyond Vance as she navigated the steps.

  When she had shut the door, Mahegan said, “We have to execute now.”

  Vance nodded. The safe house had stretchers. They placed one set of remains on one stretcher and combined the two nearest the bomb blast on the other. There wasn’t much left of Twinkler, and the body parts fit easily on one. Handling the burnt flesh reminded Mahegan of losing his best friend, Sergeant Wesley Colgate, to a bombmaker using a Siri voice command a few years back. He had killed the bombmaker, who was attempting to flee, and then raced toward Colgate’s vehicle, which was demolished and on fire. The haunting memories of combat were never far from the surface, and this scene brought those images barreling to the fore.

  “You okay?” Vance asked.

  They were carrying the litter with the body parts through the side door and onto the lawn as the helicopter landed again. They retraced their steps and snagged the second litter. Hobart and Van Dreeves were securing the guard shack, as if they had never departed. Owens and O’Malley carried two more stretchers onto the helicopter.

  Mahegan walked up the ramp beneath the whipping rear rotor of the MH-47 and grabbed the loadmaster by the outer tactical vest.

  “Let me talk to the pilot!” he shouted.

  The loadmaster removed his helmet and handed it to Mahegan, who donned it, then pressed the PUSH TO TALK button on the communications intercom. “Night Stalker six, this is Tribal six,” Mahegan said.

  “Damn, Mahegan, you’re everywhere, man.”

  “Putting some precious cargo on here. Will send you encrypted message to the cockpit, but I wanted you to know it’s legit. It’s going to sound strange, but it’s accurate. I’ve got O’Malley working up the message right now. Four litters on the back. Vance is going to ride with you. He’ll explain the rest.”

  “Roger that. Coming from you, Jake. No issues. We’ve got your precious cargo and will deliver it where the customer wants it.”

  “I’m the customer,” Mahegan said.

  During the pilot’s pause, Mahegan watched Vance and one of the crew members ferry the two other litters into the belly of the aircraft.

  “No doubt,” the pilot said.

  “Be safe,” Mahegan said, and handed the helmet to the crew chief.

  Mahegan walked off the ramp where Vance met him.

  “You have the controls,” Mahegan said to Vance.

  “I’ve got this. You watch that woman in there . . . and your back,” Vance shouted above the roaring rotors.

  Mahegan gave the crew chief a circular motion with his hand, meaning lift the ramp and get going.

  He jogged back into the house and found O’Malley, who had returned already and was prepared to hit SEND on the secure-text communications to the pilot.

  Mahegan nodded
. They had nearly precisely executed the first part of The Plan. That sense of perfection, though, always gave him pause.

  What was he missing? There was always something.

  He thought about Cassie. The drugs concerned him and maybe that was the issue. He had no control over Cassie’s role in all of this.

  Would she be able to complete The Plan?

  Biagatti was there, hugging herself and staring distantly out the window.

  “The president and vice president are dead,” she said. Her voice was flat, without affect.

  “You better call the Speaker of the House,” Mahegan said.

  Biagatti turned and looked at him. “Yes, I better.”

  CHAPTER 12

  CASSIE SAT IN A STYLISH BLUE VELVET CHAIR MADE SOMEWHERE IN Scandinavia. Its curves were sleek and angular. Her arms and legs were crossed as she looked through the darkness at the Potomac River from the penthouse apartment of Zara Perro. The rucksack was beside her. Somehow, it seemed smarter to keep it with them than to leave it in the car.

  Zara was drinking a glass of vodka, neat from the freezer. The tumbler had been two-thirds full and now was nearly empty. She sat in a similar modern chair that faced outward, overlooking the Potomac River as the wide body of water angled southeast, splitting Virginia and Maryland.

  “The Wharf?” Cassie asked. “When I was a kid, this place was a fish market. My dad would bring me here. It smelled like a trash heap, but we would always buy the stripers. Dad loved his stripers.”

  She thought of her father, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A U.S. Army four-star general. Their relationship had waxed and waned. When she was a young girl, he had doted on her, embodying the proud family man. As she became an athlete and wished to follow in his footsteps, he resisted. Law school, med school, anything other than the military, he had urged. His words strengthened her resolve to pursue a military path. The more he resisted, the more she had forged ahead, all the way to becoming the first female graduate of Ranger school. Instead of being proud of her, though, he had made a mockery of her by publicly stating women should not be Rangers. Didn’t have the abilities. Might fail their comrades in battle. Too weak.