Designated Survivor (20 page)

“Sure was,” Baasch said. “So, the forms?”

“What? Oh, yeah,” the man opened his desk drawer and pulled out a cluttered folder. He flipped through it and took out six pages and put the folder away. “Not much they don’t ask about, hope you aren’t shy. But I guess it’s the world we live in today.”

“Sure is,” Baasch said. He took the forms and without thinking about it squared the pages up and folded them cleanly in half. “I’ll get these back to you as quick as I can.”

“Yeah. I got a couple people interested,” Larry said. Baasch could tell he was lying. Nobody who interviewed with this man would actually want the job unless they were desperate. “They usually like to go through an agency, but the pricks they send over never last more than a few months before they take a job somewhere else.”

“Well I’m looking for something long term,” Baasch said. “I live out in Aldie and this would sure be an easy commute.”

“I hear that,” Larry said. “I drive in from f’n Winchester everyday. At least an hour each way and that’s on a good day.”

“You should get an earlier start home,” Baasch said. “Beat the traffic.” He glanced over at the brown metal time clock on the wall and vertical row of cards beside it then back at his interviewer, a slight smirk on his face. “There’s ways to make sure you get your time in.” He knew the lazy American likely left early every day, presenting the option to help him clock out long after he’d left would be very tempting.

“You get it,” Larry nodded. “So, any questions?”

Baasch looked around the small room in a trailer that had been made a permanent structure on the government compound. “Would it be possible to see the equipment?”

Larry Ferguson looked at him with no expression, hands on the edge of the desk in front of him and he didn’t move for several seconds. Baasch was sure he’d gone too far, sent up a red flag that triggered some little bit of the security training the government employee had been through, when the fat man finally spoke. “Shit. You do like what you do, don’t ya? You probably get a hard on for HVAC. Supposed to have your clearance first, but you said you worked for Cartwright before?”

“Cunningham,” Baasch said. “In Maryland.”

“Right, Cunningham,” Larry said. He pulled open the top desk drawer and took a key ring out and slammed the drawer shut. “Good enough for me. No harm in a little tour.” He stood and worked his way out from behind the desk.

Baasch hadn’t yet seen Larry Ferguson standing up. He’d already been settled in behind the gunmetal grey desk when Baasch was escorted in by a security guard driving a base model Chevy Cruze with Homeland Security Police written across the side. The size of the facilities manager surprised him and he briefly wondered where clothes that size could even be purchased. Baasch stood up as Larry came around the desk and towered over the short but very round man.

“Shit. You’re a big son of a bitch, aren’t you?” Larry said as he stopped in front of Baasch. “Sure wouldn’t want to f’ with you.”

“Never really been in a fight,” Baasch said. “Can’t say I’d even know what to do.”

“Right,” Larry nodded his head, not believing the tall man in front of him.

CHAPTER 37

“So you think our guy disappeared down a stairway behind a door in a men’s room?” Grace looked at the door. A yellow mop bucket had been placed in the door to the main hallway to keep tourists from entering the restroom. Avery and Holden stood outside the door as extra incentive for nobody to come in.

“Yes,” Ben Murray said.

“I guess it’s possible. We never saw him come out of the building. Where do the stairs go?” Grace said.

Ben had made a phone call to a friend at the Smithsonian offices while waiting on Grace to arrive. He pulled up schematics on his tablet of the underground tunnels. “There’s a whole network of passages under the zoo, not too different from a big amusement park. Most of the entrances to the tunnels only connect within the park, but one provides access outside the zoo. The stairs from here go down to the zoo tunnels, but there’s a door to the subbasement of the apartment building behind the visitor’s center.”

“Why would that even exist?”

“Those apartments date back to the same time the tunnels were built. Maybe it was designed to allow a zoo director to live close by,” Ben said.

“Are there any traffic cameras with a view of the front of the apartments or the buildings parking garage?” Grace said.

“There isn’t,” Ben said. “The closest camera just gets the corner of the building from the opposite street corner, nothing usable.”

 “Netty, grab Avery and walk the area to see if you spot any private surveillance that might pick up the front of the building,” Grace said. “Holden and Ben are with me. We’re going into the tunnel.”

“Me?” Ben said.

“You found it,” Grace said. “You get to explore it.”

The stairs made three turns at landings until they arrived at the cement block passageway thirty feet below the National Zoo. A single row of fluorescent lights lined the ceiling of the eight-foot wide tunnel, with many of them burned out.

“Which way?” Grace knew just by having glanced at the maps but wanted to give his newest team member the opportunity to lead.

Ben looked each way down the tunnel then glanced at the diagram on his tablet then started walking. “This way.”

They hadn’t walked long in the winding tunnel until they came to a large metal door with a deadbolt lock. Ben reached for the knob when Grace grabbed his arm. “Hold on.”

Grace knelt down and looked at the scratches around the keyhole. “Been picked, and recently,” he said. “Someone who didn’t know what they were doing.” He stood and grabbed the knob and turned it then pulled the door open. “And luckily for us they didn’t bother to lock it again.”

Beyond the door the hall opened up into a wider area. “I think we’re under the apartment building now,” Ben said.

There were two doors. One was locked, the other opened to the parking garage under the building.

“And here’s where he left from,” Grace said. 

They walked into the garage. Most of the parking spaces had cars in them. Holden walked off to the left to look around.

“I don’t see any cameras,” Grace said.

“What about those?” Ben pointed at the two parking spots with the green illuminated electric car charging stations. “I know the chargers at the mall have systems in place to make sure non-electric cars don’t park there and to track who uses them.”

“Sounds awful Big Brother,” Grace said.

“Says the man who works for the NSA,” Ben said.

Grace turned and looked at Ben. “True.”

“Hey, might want to check this out,” Holden called from around the corner and they went to find him. He stood beside a green metal trashcan and had removed the plastic top.

They walked up and looked into the can and saw a wadded up piece of black wool. Grace reached in and grabbed it and let it unroll. “It’s the coat,” he said.

As the coat opened up a grey fedora fell to the ground.

“You have a bag?” Grace said.

“Sure do,” Holden pulled a clear trash bag from his pocket on the side of his green combat pants that he wore every day.

“I want these bagged and every test in the book done on them,” Grace said. “Whatever you have to pay your contact to get it to the top of his to do list. I want to know where every hair, fiber and speck of dust came from.”

Holden got the two items in the bag then turned and left.

“I’m going to walk the whole garage,” Grace said. “Find out what you can from the charging stations.”

Over the next hour Grace methodically moved through the parking structure, between every car and dropping to the ground to look below each vehicle.

Ben found him in the far corner. “There’s no camera on the chargers, just a license plate scanner. You have to use a credit card to access the station. If it sees you aren’t in an electric, you’re charged for parking.”

“Sneaky,” Grace said. “But doesn’t help us.”

“Probably not. Still, I got a list of all cars that parked there over the last 12 hours,” Ben said.

CHAPTER 38

Grace hung up his phone and set it down on the table. Derek Arrington was back at the ETTF and getting restless. The FBI was pushing to get access to everything they’d found. Once it got turned over it would change the rules of engagement for Grace and his team. They operated outside the confines of the Department of Justice, generally resolving issues without a single person ever getting arrested or going to trial. But once DOJ got involved, everything had to be done by the book to ensure they could prosecute or at a minimum work with the state department to have those responsible detained and extradited back to the United States.

There was no way Grace was going to let that happen. He’d been within feet of Arash Abbasi and had purposely let him walk in and out of his building at Buzzard Point in order to identify the next target and his plan had failed. He had to get results soon or he’d be pushed out of the way.

Ben Murray sat at his computer a few tables away, churning through data he’d downloaded from the electric charging station company. Holden was due back anytime with test results on the suit jacket and hat. Everything was taking too much time and when it was done, wasn’t driving them forward.

“Shit,” Ben slammed his hands down on his desk, startling Grace.

“What?” Grace said.

“It’s just been, it’s been crazy. Too much information coming in from so many directions,” Ben said. “I shouldn’t have missed it.”

“Missed what?” Grace was up and walking over to his new analyst.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said. “This is days old now.” He handed Grace a stack of printouts with columns of numbers and names lining the pages.

“What am I looking at?”

“Call log from Tuesday,” Ben said. “I put in a request through Homeland Security to all cellphone carriers in the area to get a list of calls around the Capitol during the time of the takeover.”

“That’s a lot of calls,” Grace flipped through the pages. “Don’t beat yourself up. The phone companies are notoriously slow on delivering.”

“It wasn’t them. It was me. They had the data over to me in a few hours. I ran it through a program that would put names with numbers as well as access any GPS data for the call,” Ben said. “It takes a long time for this much data.”

“You can feed thousands of numbers in and it does all the work?” Grace said. “Where’d you get that software?”

“I wrote it,” Ben said. “It was the basis of my master’s thesis.”

Grace nodded, staring at the young man. “So, what did your program come back with?”

“It finished its routine a couple days ago, but I had it running on a cloud server,” Ben said. “I simply forgot about it.”

“So this is running outside the Homeland Security firewall?” Grace said.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “It’s not an approved piece of software. It was just a list of phone numbers. I figured nothing would come from it and I’d delete the results.”

“What did come from it?” Grace said.

Ben stood and took the stack of papers from Grace and sat them on the empty table beside his desk then flipped through them quickly until he found the page with the highlighter markings. “This,” Ben said.

Grace read the line of information. “Richard Graham,” he said. “He made a phone call. I’m sure I’m on here as is everyone else in the city.”

“No, you wouldn’t be unless you called somebody near the Capitol,” Ben said. “The numbers I had were calls sent or received from towers closest to the building.”

“Graham is a Cabinet member. I’m sure there’s a hundred reasons he’d be calling someone at the Capitol.”

“But who? Everyone on the Hill was either locked up in the Capitol or had been evacuated from the office buildings. Plus he didn’t call someone. At least nobody answered,” Ben said. “In the thousands of numbers, he shows up once. And that one call was made to a cellphone at the Capitol. It rang, but nobody answered.”

“We know there were cellphone jammers, so even if he was trying to call someone being held there, nobody could have answered.”

“Right, but the call wouldn’t have found the phone it was looking for,” Ben said. “It would be a different record, an error. This found the phone and made it ring. Look at the time of the call.”

Grace looked back down at the list and read it again, tracing the lines with his fingers. His hand froze and he looked up at Ben. “This is real? This data is accurate, without a doubt?”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“Can you show me where the phone was that he called?” Grace said.

Ben sat back down at his desk and dug into the software, finding the line displaying Richard Graham’s phone call and clicked in to place the signal on a layer over an online map system. “Right there.”

Grace looked at the time on the paper again then at the satellite view of the United States Capitol. “I gotta get to Herndon, and you’re coming with me.”

Netty had brought back a new Dodge Charger sedan in black with the overpowered HEMI engine. It was more than she usually went for, generally opting for vehicles that would blend in or that weren’t new enough that insurance companies would try to find the car before paying out to their client for the stolen vehicle. The Charger had been low-hanging fruit, left at the end of the circle drive in front of the Hamilton Hotel with the engine running. The rumble of the 370 horsepower engine had been irresistible to her. She’d sent Ben to distract the hotel doorman with typical tourist questions and then picked him up from a metro station eighteen blocks away then they’d returned to Buzzard Point.

Now the Charger was across the bridge and onto Interstate 66 and Grace had it doubling the speed limit. Every few seconds he reached for his phone to call Arrington, but he didn’t want to discuss this on an open line. Ben sat beside him, white knuckling the handle above the passenger window. The car exited onto Route 50 and rolled through two red lights, barely missing being hit from the side by a Fairfax Connector commuter bus at the second light. A right turn onto Centreville Road and a half-minute later he made the turn to the gate for the Homeland Security building. It had been 24 minutes since he’d stood talking to Ben in the workroom.