His mouth opened in a frantic, whispered plea. “No…”
The last thing Hank Smith saw on earth was a blinding burst of bright light.
Salah Madani lowered his silenced 9mm automatic and stared into the car’s blood-spattered front seat for a moment. Neither of the two policemen showed any signs of life.
Sure now that they were dead, the Egyptian turned away and signaled the rest of his team into action. Four men wearing the same kind of black overalls and black ski masks to hide their features darted out of an alley and loped across the parking lot toward the New Hope Church. Two of them held shotguns at the ready, guarding another pair lugging heavy, bulging backpacks.
Madani stayed by the police car ready to abort this mission at the first sign of trouble. Not that he expected any. Not now. America’s cities averaged only two full-time law enforcement officers for every thousand or so of their citizens. Spread so thinly across such a vast population, the police simply could not be everywhere and protect everyone all the time. This would be even simpler and safer than his cell’s earlier work in Dallas.
A soft whistle from the alley caught the Egyptian’s attention, and he saw another figure in black there giving him a thumbs-up signal. Antonovic had finished setting his charges ahead of schedule.
Men and women and children dressed in their Sunday best packed every pew and aisle of the New Hope Baptist Church, swaying in time with the music as they sang. Sweat beaded up on shining faces and foreheads. With so many people crowded so close together, the temperature inside was climbing rapidly, but nobody wanted to break the spell the overwhelming sense of fellowship and community by opening the church doors or windows. Perhaps later, perhaps when the minister began his oration, they would seek comfort in the cool night air. For now, though, the congregation was content to stand and shout out its joy to the Lord in hymns of praise and celebration.
None of them heard the faint, muffled thump as an explosive charge knocked out an electrical switching station two blocks away.
The power went off in a five-block radius around the New Hope Baptist Church. Streetlights and homes went dark instantly. But the loss of electricity knocked out more than lights. It also disabled fire alarms and sprinkler systems.
Inside the church itself, the hymn stumbled to a stop in the sudden darkness. Voices rose in consternation as people called out for lights or for their husbands, wives, parents, and children. Other voices urged calm and asked everyone to stand still until the electricity came back on. Two of the ushers standing in the back tried to open the main doors to let the congregation filter outside.
They were chained shut.
Seconds later, the incendiary charges Madani’s men had planted around the outside of the church began going off.
Washington, D.C.
Although it was close to midnight, most of the lights in the massive
FBI
headquarters building were on. More bright lights shone on the streets surrounding the imposing structure. Television crews from around the world were camped out there, relaying a constant stream of reports to their viewers about the progress, or lack of progress, of the FBI’s special counterterroristforce. Normally, D.C.-area investigations were run out of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office at Buzzard Point on the Anacostia River. In a bid to present the public with a confidence-inducing backdrop, the FBI’s powers-that-he had insisted that Special Agent Mike Flynn run his task force from the more imposing and accessible Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. As the weeks slid by without results, many of them were beginning to think that had been a mistake.
Just through the building’s main doors, Colonel Peter Thorn finished signing in at the security desk and clipped a visitor’s badge to his uniform jacket. “Where do I go now?” he asked.
A grim-faced guard slid his briefcase back across the desk and pointed toward a small open area near a bank of elevators. “Just wait there, sir. Agent Gray will be right down.”
Thorn spent the next few minutes watching a sporadic stream of other visitors run through the maze of security precautions. Like every other important government building and military base, the Hoover Building was locked up tight shielded from terrorist attacks by concrete barriers outside and metal detectors and armed guards inside. So far none of the right-wing or left-wing terrorist groups they were hunting had tried to target a secure installation, but no one was taking any chances.
Helen Gray stepped out of an arriving elevator into the waiting area. She smiled as soon as she saw him, but even the smile couldn’t hide the fact that she was dead tired and deeply troubled. There were faint worry lines developing around her eyes.
Thorn knew that expression. It was the same look he saw on every face inside both the Pentagon and the Hoover Building. It was the same look he saw every morning in his mirror. It had been sixteen days since the first bomb blasts rocked the National Press Club. Sixteen days. And yet, despite the application of massive investigative manpower and every piece of advanced forensic technology at the FBI’s disposal, they seemed no closer to solving any of the dizzying parade of terrorist attacks that were coming with increasing frequency. They were losing ground, not gaining it.
Helen stopped a few feet from him. “Hello, Peter,” she said softly.
“Hi.” Thorn struggled against the temptation to take her in his arms. They were on public ground and near the inner sanctum of her professional life. Flaunting their personal relationship inside the Hoover Building would only damage her hard-won credibility with her superiors. “I’ve got those patrol overlays you asked for.”
“Great.” She nodded toward the elevators. “We can go over them in my office, if you’d like.”
“I’d like that a lot.”
On paper, Thorn was here to help coordinate Delta Force’s operations in and around Washington with the FBI’s counterpart counterterrorist unit, the
HRT
. In reality, he hoped to obtain more hard data than he could glean from the Pit-flack news briefings the Department of Justice held at irregular times. Virtually the only good thing about the administration’s ill-conceived Operation
SAFE
SKIES
was that it gave him a better excuse to prowl around inside the Bureau’s hallowed halls. He was still looking for some way to make himself useful to his country in this snowballing crisis.
Helen led him into an elevator and punched the number for the floor set aside to hold Flynn’s special counterterrorist task force. They rode up in a companionable silence. The security cameras and microphones visible on the car ceiling precluded any meaningful conversation.
They emerged into a bustling hallway. Plush carpeting, soft lighting, and freshly painted pastel walls testified to the administrative clout of those who ordinarily worked in this part of the headquarters building. Now the administrators and bureaucrats were gone, crowded onto other floors by Flynn’s task force.
Everywhere Thorn looked he saw agents and technicians hard at work hunched over computer terminals or blownup crime-scene photos, standing over humming fax and copier machines, or hurrying from room to room carrying hard-copy files or disks. But there were also more untenanted offices and empty desks than he’d expected.
Helen saw his quizzical look and nodded wearily. “We’re running short of warm bodies and good brains. Between Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle, we’d already lost a lot of manpower. Two more teams left for Disneyland and Louisville tonight. I’m afraid we’re getting close to the breaking point.”
Thorn knew exactly what she meant. For all its influence in American law enforcement, the
FBI
was a comparatively small organisation. Just over eight thousand agents worked out of the Bureau’s fifty-five field offices, and only a small percentage had the training and experience needed for topnotch counterterrorist work. In 1995, the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing had tied up most of the FBI’s available forensics specialists and terrorism experts for weeks. Now the Bureau was being forced to cope with the terrible equivalent of a new Oklahoma City attack one or two times a week. Flynn’s task force was the only place to find the people needed to staff additional investigative units. Caught in a constant reshuffling as new teams were formed and dispatched to the field, the strain was clearly beginning to tell on the agents assigned to each case. There were only so many investigators, so many hours of computer and lab time, and so many hours in the day. It was no wonder that all of them were beginning to feel like they were floundering around in the dark, waiting helplessly for the next blow to fall, the next bomb to go off.
Helen opened the door to a large office suite and led him through a crowded central area. Panel partitions broke the room up into smaller cubicles, each one just big enough for a single desk, two chairs, two phones, and a network-linked personal computer. None of the people closeted in the cubicles looked up as they passed through.
Helen had her own tiny office off to one side. It wasn’t much just four walls, a door, and a desk but it offered her some much-valued privacy. She used it to catch up on paperwork whenever her
HRT
section was out of the duty rotation.
She shut the door behind them and kissed him passionately, almost fiercely. Then she stepped back and smiled again, a shade more happily this time, at the surprised expression on his face. “I’ve been waiting to do that since I last saw you, Peter.”
For the first time in days, Thorn felt his spirits lift a bit. He moved closer. “It has been a while. I guess I’ll just have to prove my good intentions all over again.”
Helen’s eyebrows went up. She backed up to her desk and held up a warning hand. “Sorry! No fooling around on federal property, mister.” She shook her head in regret. “We’ll have to save that for later. After we’re both off duty.”
Thorn nodded slowly, briefly reluctant to come back to the grim reality they faced. “Fair enough.” He set his briefcase down on the floor and took the chair she indicated. “So. Fill me in. From what I hear, nothing’s working.”
Her smile slipped. “Worse.” She sat down in the only other chair. “We keep running into dead ends at every turn. We’ve got fingerprints from the press club bomb, but they don’t match anyone in our files. Even the C4 used was bought by an untraceable dummy corporation. It’s the same story everywhere.”
“I thought you had a picture of the bomber.”
Helen nodded. “One of our guys spotted him on the videotapes shot by the Metro surveillance cameras. Wearing that damned fake
ECNS
jacket and carrying all his gear. Flynn’s releasing it to all the news services tomorrow morning.”
Then she shrugged. “Not that it’ll do much good. Here.” She rummaged around in the papers stacked on her desk, pulled one out, and slid it across to him. It was a blowup of a photo taken by one of the Metro cameras.
Thorn studied it and saw right away what she meant. The man framed in the picture was dark-haired, thin, of average height, and wore dark glasses and a mustache. Even if he still looked anything like the photo, and that was doubtful, there were millions of men all across America who might fit that description.
He handed it back to her without saying anything.
“We have even less to work with in Chicago,” Helen said tiredly.
“Shell casings from the scene would help us ID the weapons used… if we could only find the weapons. And that rental van we found was useless wiped clean.”
“What about the rental agency?” he asked. “Anything from them?”
“Zip. They think the guy who rented it had blond hair and blue eyes… but they’re not sure. What we are sure of is that he used a fake credit card and a fake driver’s license.”
Thorn nodded. Again, that wasn’t surprising. Credit card fraud and forged identification were a multibillion-dollar business in the United States. “And there’s nothing new from any other site?”
“Not a thing. The explosions and fires in both Seattle and Dallas/Fort Worth took care of most of the evidence. We know now they were both deliberately set not accidents. We don’t know much more than that.”
Thorn set his jaw, fighting memories that were still painful. “What about Flight 352?”
Helen’s gaze softened. She had her own nightmare visions of that terrible day and night by the Potomac. “The lab says the solid-rocket exhaust residues we picked up on the shore near Georgetown probably came from Russian-designed missiles either SA-7s or the newer SA-16s. Our divers and the Park Police are still dragging the river for any bits and pieces we could use to confirm that.”
“Wonderful,” Thorn said softly. There were so many SA7s and SA-16s piled up in military and terrorist arsenals around the world that tracing the weapons used for this particular attack would be almost impossible.
“What about on your end, Peter? Have you and the Maestro zeroed in on any of our guys who might have gone bad?” Helen asked.
“Only a handful.” Thorn spread his hands in a gesture of negation.
“And none I’d lay any money on. One’s in prison, so he’s out. Another’s overseas working as a bodyguard for a Saudi prince. I understand most of the others had airtight alibis when your people checked them out. Anyway, none of them showed any signs of having the kind of connections or money they’d have to have to jump all over the country without getting caught.”
Suddenly, he shook his head. “I just don’t buy this, Helen. I could swallow the Bureau not spotting one or two small, sophisticated domestic terrorist groups… but three or four or five? Where the hell are all these bastards coming from?”
“Believe me, Peter, we’ve all been asking the same question,” Helen said quietly. She lowered her eyes to the pile of reports and photos on her desk. “Our intelligence people honestly thought they had a handle on every group likely to cause trouble. But it’s a big country out there and the evidence is pretty clear that we screwed it up somehow. Maybe we counted too much on these people slotting neatly into our psychological profiles. Or we relied too heavily on informants who weren’t tracking the right organisations.”