“Yes, that’s right, Captain. You have to shoot into an office building.”
Shafer didn’t object to the change in weapons. He had worked with plenty of snipers and knew they were always idiosyncratic, had their own peculiar way of doing things. He’d expected modifications from her and was surprised there weren’t more, actually.
“So who’s going to die tomorrow?” Nikki Williams finally asked. “I need to know that, of course.”
Shafer told Captain Williams the target, and to her credit, she never raised an eyebrow. Her only reaction was “My price just went up. It just doubled.”
Shafer nodded slowly. “Agreed. That will be just fine, Captain.”
Then Nikki Williams smiled. “Did I settle too low?”
Shafer nodded again. “Yes, you did. But I’m going to give you one-fifty anyway. Just don’t miss him.”
Chapter 29
WE MIGHT HAVE gotten a decent break in the case—finally, something, and it had started with a tip from me. The wheelchair! We had a lead.
At ten in the morning, I raced across Washington to the Farragut apartment building on Cathedral Avenue. Three years before, a partner of mine named Patsy Hampton had been murdered in the underground garage of the Farragut. Geoffrey Shafer had killed her. The Farragut was where his old therapist lived.
We’d had Dr. Elizabeth Cassady under surveillance for the past thirty-six hours, and it seemed to have paid off. The Weasel had shown up. He parked in the underground garage near where Patsy had been brutally killed. Then he went upstairs to the penthouse apartment, 10D, where Dr. Cassady still lived.
He’d come in a wheelchair.
I boarded an elevator with four other agents. We had our guns drawn and ready. “He’s extremely dangerous. Please take what I’m saying seriously,” I reminded them as we stepped from the elevator on the therapist’s floor.
It had been painted since the last time I was there. So much of this was familiar, hauntingly so. I was getting angry all over again about Patsy Hampton’s death, about the Weasel.
I pressed the bell at 10D.
Then I called out, “FBI, open the door. FBI, Dr. Cassady.”
The door opened, and I was staring at a tall, attractive blond woman whom I recognized.
Elizabeth Cassady recognized me, too. “Dr. Cross,” she said. “What a surprise. Well, no, it isn’t really.”
As she spoke I heard a wheelchair rolling up behind her. I raised my gun, pushing Dr. Cassady out of the way.
I aimed my weapon.
“Stop right there! Stop!” I shouted.
The wheelchair, and the man seated in it, came into full view. I shook my head and slowly lowered the gun. I held back a curse. I smelled a rat, or should I say a Weasel.
The man in the wheelchair spoke. “I’m obviously not Colonel Geoffrey Shafer. Nor have I met him. I’m a stage actor named Francis Nicolo, and I am physically impaired, so no rough treatment, please.
“I was told to come here and I am being paid handsomely to do so. I was instructed to tell you that the colonel says hello and that you should have listened to the explicit instructions you were given. Since you are here, you didn’t listen.”
The man in the wheelchair then bowed from the waist. “That’s my part, my piece. It’s all I know. How was my performance? Acceptable? You may applaud if you wish.”
“You’re under arrest,” I told him.
Then I turned to Elizabeth Cassady. “So are you. Where is he? Where’s Shafer?”
She shook her head and looked incredibly sad. “I haven’t seen Geoffrey in years. I’m being used, and so are you. Of course, for me it’s harder—I loved him. I strongly suggest that you get used to it. This is how his mind works, and I should know.”
So should I, I was thinking. So should I.
Chapter 30
THIS IS IMPRESSIVE, thought Captain Nikki Williams. And not the airfield meeting itself. The whole plan was dazzling. Audacious.
Manassas Regional was a small, nondescript airport spread over eight hundred acres, with two parallel runways. There was a main terminal building and an FAA control tower, but it was a very good spot for the mission.
Somebody is really thinking things through. This is going to work.
A couple of minutes after Captain Williams arrived at the airfield, she saw her helicopter setting down. She had two instant notions: where the hell had these people gotten an MD-530? And it was just right for the job she’d been given.
This was definitely going to work. It might not even be that hairy.
Nikki Williams hurried to the helicopter, carrying the Winchester in a cloth sling bag. The pilot had the other critical puzzle pieces for her. He was apparently the man with the final plan.
“I’m all fueled. We’re headed northeast, over Route 28. I’m gonna set down for half a minute or so in Rock Creek Park,” he told her.
“Rock Creek Park? I don’t follow,” Captain Williams said. “Why would you put down again once we’re airborne?”
“The park stop is just to get you up on the skid. That’s your position for the hit. All right with you?”
“Perfect,” Williams said. “I get it now.”
The scheme was daring, but it made sense to her. Everything about it did. They had even picked an overcast day with very slight winds. The MD-530 was fast and highly maneuverable. It was also stable enough to shoot from. In her army days, she’d fired thousands of rounds from them in all kinds of weather, and practice made perfect.
“You ready?” the pilot called back once she was on board. “We’re going to be in and out of D.C. in less than nine minutes.”
Williams gave it a thumbs-up, and the MD-530 corkscrewed up fast, flew northeast, and was soon crossing the Potomac. It never got higher than thirty or forty feet off the ground and was traveling at about eighty knots.
The helicopter set down for less than forty seconds in Rock Creek Park.
Captain Williams took a position on the right skid, behind and just below the pilot. Then she signaled for him to lift off. “Let’s go. Let’s do it.”
Not only is this smart, it is cool as hell, she couldn’t help thinking as the helicopter took off again and closed on her target. In and out of harm’s way in less than nine minutes. He’ll never know what hit him.
Chapter 31
I WAS BACK at my desk before noon, feeling edgy and ragged, tapping into the National Crime Information Center computer database, drinking about a gallon of black coffee—which was the worst thing to do. The goddamn Weasel: he knew we had found out about the wheelchair. But how? They have somebody inside, don’t they? Somebody warned Shafer.
At about one, I was still at my desk when a shrill, ear-splitting alarm sounded in the building.
At the same time my pager signaled a terrorist alert.
I heard loud voices up and down the hall. “Look out your window! Go to your window, quick!”
“Oh, good God! What the hell are they doing down there?” somebody else yelled.
I took a look outside and was stunned to see two men in fatigues running across the pink granite cobblestone of the inner courtyard. They were just passing the bronze sculpture “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.”
My first wild thought was that the men might be human bombs. How else could just two of them hope to damage the building or anybody inside?
An agent named Charlie Kilvert from next door peeked his head inside. “You catching this, Alex? You believe it?”
“I see it. I don’t believe it.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the action down in the courtyard, though. Within seconds, heavily armed agents had appeared on the scene.
At first there were only three, then at least a dozen. The guards from the sidewalk booth suddenly came tearing up the driveway, too.
All the agents below had their guns pointed at the two men in fatigues. Both of them had stopped running now. They appeared to be surrendering.
The agents weren’t coming any closer,
though. Maybe they shared my idea about “human bombs,” but more likely they were following procedure.
The suspects were holding their arms high over their head. Then, slowly and deliberately, they lay flat on their stomach. What the hell?
Then I spotted a helicopter drift around the south side of the Hoover Building. Just about all I could see was the nose and rotor.
The ominous hovering of the copter caused the agents in the courtyard to aim their weapons into the sky. This was a no-fly zone, after all. The agents on the ground were yelling and threatening with their guns.
Then the helicopter banked sharply away from the Hoover Building. It disappeared from sight.
Seconds later Charlie Kilvert was in the doorway again. “Somebody’s been shot upstairs!”
I almost knocked Charlie over getting out the door.
Chapter 32
THE MD-530 WAS REALLY moving as it got to Washington; the pilot was using office and apartment buildings for cover now, sliding between them like somebody playing the craziest game of hide-and-seek.
The flying tactics would avoid radar detectors and also confuse the hell out of casual observers, Nikki Williams figured. Besides, this was all happening incredibly fast. No one would be able to react, and an air force jet wouldn’t fly in this close to these office buildings, anyway.
She could see the target now. Hot damn! The disturbance on the ground had been planned and lots of people were at their windows at the target building, which she knew was FBI headquarters. This is really something! She loved it! She had seen some major-league action in the army, but not enough of it, and there were always a thousand rules you were supposed to follow.
Only one rule now, baby: shoot this guy dead and get the hell out of Dodge before anybody can do a goddamn thing about it.
The pilot had the coordinates of the targeted window and, sure enough, two men in dark suits were standing there, looking down on the street action—the diversion built into the plan. Captain Williams knew what her target looked like, and by the time he saw her rifle—only a hundred feet away—he’d be dead and she’d be on her way out of there.
One of the men behind the window appeared to shout a warning and tried to push the other one away. Quite the hero.
No matter—Williams pulled the trigger. Easy does it.
Then, escape!
The helicopter pilot used the same flying technique for exfil and headed directly to the drop zone in Virginia. It took just three and a half minutes from the FBI building all the way out to the drop area. Nikki Williams was still buzzing from the shot and kill, not to mention the big fee she’d be getting. Double-fee money, and God knows, she was worth every penny.
The helicopter set down easily, and she jumped down off the skid. She flipped a salute to the pilot, and he reached out his right arm toward her—and shot her twice, once in the throat, once in the forehead. The pilot didn’t like it, but he did it. Those were his orders, and he knew enough to obey them. The female sniper had apparently told someone else about her mission. The pilot knew nothing more than that.
Just his piece of the big picture.
Chapter 33
THIS MUCH WE KNEW.
The two men captured down in the courtyard had been hustled inside the FBI building and were now being held on the second floor. But who the hell were they?
The serious rumor circulating was that Ron Burns had been shot, that my boss and friend was dead.
Sources had it that a successful sniper attack had been made and that Burns’s office was the target. I couldn’t help thinking of the assassination of Stacy Pollack earlier that year. The Wolf had never actually taken responsibility for the murder of the head of the SIOC, but we knew he was the one who ordered it. Burns vowed revenge, though none had been taken. Not to my knowledge, anyway.
About half an hour after the sniper attack, I got a call to go down to the second floor. That was good: I needed to do something, or go crazy in my office.
“Anything on the shooting upstairs?” I asked the ACAS who called me.
“Nothing I know of. We’ve heard the rumors, too. No one will deny or confirm anything. I spoke to Tony Woods in the director’s office, and he won’t say anything. Nobody’s talking, Alex. Sorry, man.”
“Something happened, though? Somebody got shot?”
“Yeah. Somebody got shot up there.”
Feeling sick about everything that had happened in the past few days, I hurried down to the second floor and was led by a guard to a row of holding cells I hadn’t known even existed. The agent who met me explained that he wanted me to conduct the interview without a briefing, to get my take on the prisoners.
I walked into one of the small interview rooms and found two scared-looking black men dressed in cammies. Terrorists? Doubtful. They looked to be in their mid-thirties, maybe early forties, but it was hard to tell. They needed haircuts and shaves, their clothes were soiled and wrinkled, and the room already stank with perspiration and worse.
“We already tol’ our story,” one of the men complained bitterly, screwing up his wrinkled face, as I entered the room. “How many times we got to tell y’all?”
I sat down across from the two of them. “This is a homicide investigation,” I said. I didn’t know whether they’d been told that, but it was where I wanted to start. “Somebody is dead upstairs.”
The man who hadn’t spoken yet covered his face with his hands and started to moan and sway from side to side. “Oh no, oh no, oh, God no,” he groaned.
“Take your hands away from your face and listen to me!” I yelled at him.
Both men looked at me and shut up. Now they were listening, at least.
“I want to hear your story. Everything you know, every single detail. And I don’t care that you told it before. You hear me? You understand? I don’t care how many times you think you told it.
“Right now, you two are murder suspects. So I want to hear your side of things. Talk to me. I am your lifeline, your only lifeline. Now talk.”
They did. Both of them. They rambled, incoherently at times, but they talked. A little more than two hours later I left the interview room feeling that I’d heard the whole truth, at least their sketchy version of it.
Ron Frazier and Leonard Pickett were drifters who lived near Union Station. Both were army veterans. They’d been hired off the street to run around the FBI building like the crazies that they probably were in real life. The camouflage outfits were theirs, the same clothes they said they wore every day in the park and panhandling on the streets of D.C.
Next I went into another interview room to brief two very senior agents from upstairs. They looked about as tense as I felt. I wondered what they knew about Ron Burns.
“I don’t think those two know much of anything,” I told them. “They may have been approached by Geoffrey Shafer. Whoever hired them had an English accent. The physical description fits Shafer. Whoever it was paid them all of two hundred bucks. Two hundred dollars to do what they did.”
I looked across at the senior agents. “Your turn. Tell me what happened upstairs. Who was shot? Is it Ron Burns?”
One of the two agents, Millard, took a deep breath, then spoke. “This doesn’t leave the room, Alex. Not until we say so. Understood?”
I nodded solemnly. “Is the director dead?”
“Thomas Weir is dead. Weir is the one who was shot,” said Agent Millard.
Suddenly I felt weak-kneed and woozy. Somebody had killed the director of the CIA.
Chapter 34
CHAOS.
Once word got out about the murder of Thomas Weir, it was on every TV channel and the press corps began to circle the Hoover Building. Of course, nobody could tell them what we thought had really happened, and every reporter knew in his gut that we were holding back information.
Later that afternoon we’d learned that the body of a woman had been found in the woods of northern Virginia. We believed that she might have been the sniper who killed Tom Weir.
A Winchester rifle was found with the body, and it was almost definitely the murder weapon.
At five o’clock the Wolf made contact again.
The phone in the crisis room rang. Ron Burns himself picked up.
I had never seen the director look graver, and more vulnerable. Thomas Weir had been a friend of his; the Weir and Burns families went on vacation to Nantucket together in the summertime.
The Wolf began, “You’re an extraordinarily lucky man, Director. Those bullets were meant for you. I don’t make many mistakes, but I also know they’re inevitable in a military operation this complex. I accept that mistakes happen in any war. It’s simply a fact of life.”
Burns said nothing. His face was expressionless, a pale mask, impossible to read, even by any of us.
The Wolf continued, “I understand how you’re feeling, how all of you are feeling. Mr. Weir was a family man, yes? Basically a decent human being? So now you’re angry at me. You want to put me down like a mad dog. But think about it from my perspective. You were told the rules, and you still chose to go your own way.
“As you can see now, your way led to disaster and death. It always will lead to disaster and death. It’s inevitable. And the stakes are much higher than just a single life. So let’s move on. The clock is ticking.
“You know, it’s difficult to find people today who will listen. Everyone is so self-absorbed these days. Take Captain Williams, for example, our assassin. She was instructed not to tell anyone about the job she was hired to do. But she told her husband. Now she’s dead. I understand that you found the body. News flash: the husband is dead, too. You might want to retrieve the body at their home. It’s in Denton, Maryland. Do you need an address? I can help with that.”
Burns spoke. “We already found her husband’s body. What’s the point of your call? What do you want from us?”
“I would think it would be obvious, Mr. Director. I want you to know that I mean exactly what I say. I expect compliance, and I will get it. One way or the other, I will get my way. I always do.