“Neill,” said Chandler, “show some respect. Nick has been with us and behind us every fucking step.”
“You’re right,” said Neill. “Sorry, Nick, I misspoke.”
“Emotions running high. Everybody, please drop down into second gear, okay?”
He waited a few seconds.
“Okay, there’s a countersniper technology that turns on luring the bad guy to shoot through a microphone pickup field. It’s called Boomerang II, much improved from Boomerang I, from the folks at Raytheon. Maybe Swagger can explain it better.”
“I can’t,” said Bob.
“Anyway, the microphones yield data that the program can solve, and, in one millisecond, get you velocity, caliber, weight. But, most important, it can source the bullet. I mean, fast. They’ve used it hooked to artillery in the sandbox, and they can send a flight of 105 howitzer shells to point of origin inside a second. Takes care of the sniper and the city block or village in which he was hiding.”
“How do they get Juba to shoot in the right spot?” asked the annoying Neill.
“They’re arrayed, under camouflage, around the podium. They look sort of like a ball with spikes sticking out of it. The hardware isn’t gigantic or obtrusive, and it flashes the data back to the receiving station, in the Incident Command van.”
“So they’re going to get Juba to shoot over the microphones, then track him and blow him up?” asked Neill. “Bye-bye, Queens.”
“No. They get the read back to origin, and instead of sending 105s after him, they send assets that were put in place the night before—that is, NY SWAT teams airborne in choppers. They feel they can get them on-site inside a minute or two from various hidden locales, rappel the boys onto the rooftop while squad cars beeline in from just outside the zone, and, in that way, take him alive.”
“Meanwhile,” asked Swagger, “is Mogul dead?”
“No. The heavyset blond guy isn’t Mogul. He’s career Secret Service, in a blond wig, said to bear a pretty good resemblance to the real thing. Under his blue suit, white shirt, red tie below his zipper, and Elvis rug, he’s packed in enough Level IV Kevlar to stop a truck, no problem with a bullet that’s traveled eighteen hundred yards and whose velocity is way down, under a thousand pounds, like a handgun. From a hundred yards out, he’ll convince—let alone a mile out. First shot, he goes down, behind the armored podium. He’s risking a headshot, but that’s the name of the game. He’s a stud.”
“I’ll say,” said Swagger. “I wouldn’t do that job for all the money in the world. Or all the glory.”
“Anyhow, maybe Juba goes down hard, and it’s just a kill and a great success. But, Jesus, if they get him alive, what a bonanza. A live terrorist with a long and interesting past tasked with and almost succeeding at taking down Mogul. Everybody looks great, the Bureau looks fabulous, our real enemy, the CIA, looks pitiful, Mogul gets to strut and brag and do photo ops with the head of NYPD SWAT and the blond guy in Kevlar. Meanwhile, the interrogation and trial go on all through election season.”
“Too many moving parts,” said Swagger. “Wrong goal. Goal should be to stop him—first, last, and only. ‘Capture’ is overambitious bullshit. If you don’t fixate on ‘stop,’ it can go south hard and fast.”
“Our masters have spoken,” said Nick. “It will be as it will be.”
PART 5
61
Thursday the eighth, 0800
Allah sent him a wonderful day, on the cusp of a wonderful night of deep and restful sleep, untroubled by a visit from his darkest nightmare visitor, the American sniper sent to destroy him and his mission. He awoke to a blue sky, lightly feathered with high cirrus clouds, not much breeze. The air was fresh, even perfumed. The leaves vibrated in the gentle breeze, turning first their dark faces, then their light faces, to him—in effect, shimmering.
At the river that morning, he took his Kestrel readings, came up with a two- to four-mile-per-hour north-northwest breeze, a temperature of sixty-seven degrees, probably to rise a few degrees by midafternoon, and only forty-four percent humidity. The sun was bold, casting sharp shadows, but it would be high in the sky by shooting time and thus would render the image shadeless. The buildings, the grounds, the vegetation, the colors, the lack of activity, the lack of security vehicles or men: all as it should be. On the water, the rills were low.
Praise be to Allah, He who provides.
There was no hurry. He ambled back to the building, halting again for a long, keen observation. Again, nothing, nobody, no cruising police vehicles or plainclothes men in nondescript sedans. No helicopters above, and, with his gifted eyesight, he was sure there were no drones high in the sky.
He entered the lobby boldly, knowing that the TV monitor was down, had always been down. He took the elevator up with a young woman and her two children. Nothing was said, but the mood was calm. The children were well behaved, the mother attentive. They got off on 3, he continued to 6. Hallway empty. He unlocked, entered, and locked again, checked his watch. Time for prayer.
He slipped on his mask, hairnet, and rubber gloves, as always. He went to his prayer rug—a towel—and prostrated himself for seven minutes.
Allah, I beseech Thee, look with favor upon my enterprise today, for it is enacted to Your glory, on Your behalf, for Your war. I give up my life to You, O Allah, and will gladly leave it if that is Your decision. I pray that You make my eye sharp, my hand strong, my heart calm, my finger delicate. In Your interest and according to Your laws I dedicate that which is to come, O Beloved One, and ask as well Your favor on my ancestors and my descendants, for all are a part of this holy moment.
On and on it went, a litany of loyalty, love, and dedication. It poured the lubricant of faith throughout his body so that all processes became easier, slick with grace, beauty, and precision. His mind was narrowing, his breath was smoothing, his fingers were strengthening. Only one thing occupied his mind.
He went to the closet where he had stored a purchase he had made: it was a can of acetone. It would chemically obliterate any traces of himself on the weapon. Using a cotton ball to blot, he assiduously wiped the steel and plastic down, even if the plastic was favored not to preserve fingerprints. He worked at a slow, sure pace, watching the liquid as it spread to a sheen and evaporated, not missing any plausible surface, taking all traces of Juba with it into the ether. The scope, particularly the turrets, demanded special attention, as it could easily retain evidence if not carefully purified, though he had never touched any part of the weapon with his naked fingers.
Next, he drew out several plastic bags. Each contained DNA-carrying microdebris from the actual corpse of Brian Waters—dandruff, flakes of skin, filaments of nostril and head hair—and applied them gradually to the rifle. A piece of tape yielded a thumbprint, and by applying it to the Thunder Beast suppressor—a long tube with chambers and aperture that would dissipate the sound of the shot—then peeling it off, he transferred the image. He applied and then removed another tape—this one for the sake of the trigger finger—around the trigger guard and the trigger itself. In the end, he had rendered the rifle appropriate to the biological reality of his avatar’s presence and his own invisibility.
He did the same to the iPhone, smearing it with the detritus of poor Mr. Waters. A close investigation would reveal nothing except the FirstShot app and the occasional posts of Mr. Waters on his all-but-deserted Facebook page. He checked and saw that certain pages had come to his cue, and he knew exactly the stroke to send them instantly to post on the Dark Web, where they would be found and tracked to this iPhone and to Brian A. Waters. The pages contained superb screeds of hate and blasphemy, which would make the man’s sickness manifest to all and provide the motive for his crime. Brian A. Waters was about to become the most famous man on earth, as well as the most wanted. Too bad he’d been dead for over three months and wouldn’t be around to enjoy all the attention.
Next, he checked his getaway bag. Yes, passport, ID, cash. He knew exactly his escape route, where he would be picked up by Iranian operatives and how he would be smuggled back to Syria.
It was almost over.
He checked his watch.
So little time.
He went to the window in front of the rifle. He had been prepared to cut the glass, use a suction cup to remove the appropriate fragment, shoot through it, then wedge the glass back in place so that no one observing from the outside would know that this room, automatically, was the source of the assassin’s bullet. But a happy surprise had been that the larger pane of glass was flanked on each side by two narrower ones, either of which could be cranked open, revealing a screen, through which fresh air could circulate if the building’s air-conditioning went down. Cranking it open also revealed ample room for shooting, with a perfect vantage on the target. At the last second, he would cut the screen, peel it back, and open a square through which he could shoot. His plan was to fire once as carefully as possible, crank the bolt as quickly as possible, fire nine more rounds, forming a kind of beaten zone, so that the man would take bullet after bullet. He would quickly close the window to obscure the location. The authorities would find the sniper’s nest eventually, but he would be long gone.
Now there was nothing left to do but wait.
1000
It turned out there wasn’t really space in the operations room for Nick and his crew, not with all the bigs who’d crowded in to watch the triumph. Probably that was best for all, as it prevented the bigs from noting the annoyance of the passed-over Nick team, and it prevented the passed-over Nick team from expressing snarky resentment.
At one point, the Director and some otherwise anonymous factotums came up to express gratitude for contributions, creativity, and the success about to arrive, although the leader himself spent more time with Chandler—as what sane man would not—than the others combined. He lurked, breathed, smiled unctuously, closed in too tight and was too fulsome in attention. Such is the expression of power in D.C., and, for her part, she stayed cool and professional and paid no acknowledgment to his interest. When the ceremony was over, the bigs left, and Nick’s people were left alone in their upstairs warren, watching the drama on a closed-circuit TV, where they were free to go as smart-ass as they wanted, though, as it turned out, no one was in any sort of smart-ass mood.
Still, they followed as the parts were carefully layered in. The choppers weren’t airborne yet, but when they were, they would hang in the air about a half mile behind the zone, which was that part of the arc 1,847 yards out in Queens that fronted on the new building over Roosevelt Drive and the East River. The Mogul sub was suiting up in Level IV Kevlar for his shot at glory; Mogul himself would arrive shortly. Teams were locked, loaded, and in place all over, the various Raytheon marvels needed for the intercept in place and tested.
Meanwhile, in Queens, SWAT units had parked during the night on blocks not far from the potential shooting sites—one of twenty-three buildings on the arc—and could get there almost as fast as the choppers. The plan was to hurl them to the newly identified shooter’s building simultaneously with the arrival of the choppers—a classic pincer move.
Swagger had little to say. As much as he hoped it would work, he didn’t believe it would. Juba was too good. Juba was better than he’d ever been. You couldn’t match ordinary brains against his and expect anything good to come of it.
“Cheer up, Bob,” said Nick. “We do this thing, have a couple of days of Mogul love and an open bar, and it’s back to Idaho and the front porch. I’m sure the deer and the antelope have missed you.”
“May I say something?” said Mr. Gold.
“A breakthrough?” asked Nick.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“Well, go ahead anyway.”
“I believe we have made an astute analysis of the evidence, and the plan itself is sound and well staffed, no half measures—and I know, from experience, that half measures are frequently catastrophic.”
“Okay,” said Nick.
“However—”
“Here it comes,” said Neill.
“It does occur to me that in one respect, hard as we have worked, we are all Juba amateurs. We’ve been in the game only a few months.”
“Yes?”
“There is only one Juba professional in the world. We are here only because of her efforts over long years. She has been tracking, imagining, stalking this fellow for over a decade.”
He paused as they all took it in.
Finally, Nick said, “Go on.”
“My thought is, at this late hour perhaps security mandates could be waived and we could reach out to Mrs. McDowell. We could put all we have—our conclusions, the time frame, the immediate anticipation of action in the countersniper plan—before her and ask her for an opinion. Well, not so much about what we plan to do but on our reading of what Juba wants to do. Maybe she’d see something we missed, maybe she’d bring an outside-the-box freshness to it, maybe there are vibrations, memes, motifs, indications, resonances, some sort of clues that we’ve missed to which she’d be sensitive. After all, we have several hours, by my watch, until the event itself is thought to transpire, so there does seem to be just enough time.”
Nick thought it over. It involved logistics, not his strong suit. He turned to Chandler.
“Is this possible?”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t think Mr. Gold means by phone, does he?”
“Face-on-face would be preferred,” said Gold. “That way, we could read her expression as she considers the analysis, which may be more elucidating than anything she might say.”
“She’s where? In the suburbs of Baltimore?”
“In the city itself, northwest Baltimore,” said Swagger. “It’s called Dorsey’s Forge.”
“What aviation assets do we have?” Nick asked Chandler.
“None. They’re all at Quantico, out of play.”
“Maryland State Police has aviation,” said Neill. “At Martin airfield, just north of Baltimore.”
“Chandler, could it work?”
“Maybe get Maryland to pick her up at some park near her home. They get her to our roof inside an hour. That would give us two hours with her to go over the stuff. I think it could be valuable.”
“Swagger?”
“She ain’t no dummy.”
“Neill?”
“Well, if nothing else, it would dispel all those little ‘if only’ doubts we have. It would represent us making every last effort, all the way to game time. No stone left unturned, that sort of thing.”
“Bob, can you call her and see if it’s even possible?”
Swagger took out his phone, punched in the number.
Two rings, three, halfway through a fourth: “Yes?”
“Janet, it’s Swagger.”
“Oh, hello,” she said.
“What’s your situation?”
“I have no situation. I’m about to clean the upstairs bathroom, in an attempt to forestall my daily martini spree another hour.”
“Is there a field, an open space, anywhere near you?”
“There’s a schoolyard two blocks away. Scott Key Elementary School.”
“Hold a second. Oh, better yet, don’t start on the bathroom. Let us do some checking at this end. Put on some comfortable shoes.”
He hung up.
“Okay,” said Nick, picking up a phone.
On-screen, they saw as in the Command Center, somebody came to the Director, and he rose and was led to a phone off camera.
Nick made the pitch.
Some chitchat, maybe the Director consulted with the White House and his staff, but, in the end, the assent was given.
“Okay,” said Nick. “Bob, call her back, read her in, and get her to that schoolyard. Chandler,
get me our State Police liaison.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll see what she has to say.”
1145
Finally: the ammunition.
Maybe this is how it begins. You cannot love the rifle if you do not love the ammunition. Something dense, deadly, charismatic in the heft and glint of it. Nothing on earth quite like it.
He had, after all the experimenting and all the lives of chained men perishing at a mile-plus in the wild beauty of Wyoming, settled upon this.
With the tip of his knife, he peeled open the package he had prepared in Wyoming. The ten Kings of Hell spilled out, each 3.681 inches long, slightly front-heavy, somehow oddly dense for volume, a function of the 250 grains of Sierra .338 diameter MatchKing hollow-point boattail bullet inserted and crushed into place by the pressure of Wilson’s .367 seating die.
He loved the cartridges. He loved to build them, to think them, to imagine them, to feel the weight and roll of them in his hand. He’d scrubbed them with acetone in Wyoming and now touched them with rubber-gloved fingers only. Thus, no Juba would be evident to investigators on their ultimate discovery, even if the brass was notoriously adverse to recording the prints of its handlers.
He held each one. Slightly overpressured with 91.2 grains of Hodgdon H1000 smokeless powder that filled each once-fired Hornady tube, to be ignited by a Federal 215M Magnum primer. The shell had been chamfered for smoothness, its burrs and eccentricities milled away. It had been neck-turned so that the grip of brass that secured the bullet was exactly .004 thick all the way around. It had been tested for runout—that is, deviation from the axis—and found to be within the metric of .001, which meant as close to perfect as humanly possible. It had been annealed, a brief heat treatment that made its consistency profound. The bullets themselves had been sharpened in the Whidden die, improving their long-range accuracy. All these boutique touches, which the same investigators would eventually discover, were consistent with the high craftsmanship of a champion shooter like Brian A. Waters. They matched perfectly, both as an object and as a product of a culture, with what would be observed when, weeks from this day, his house was unlocked and subjected to the most intense of forensic examinations. No one looking at the recovered shell could doubt that it had been produced by the man from Albuquerque, about to be revealed to the world as yet another lone gunman on a grassy knoll—well, an apartment—administering hatred via a death that would change the world.
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