Fortunately, Beale saw Ethan Ross walking north a minute, back up the hill into Georgetown on 31st. Beale pulled in well behind him, stayed far back, keeping other cars between his cab and the man walking on the sidewalk. Nolan called in to the operation’s hub, telling them to put a unit back on M Street, a couple hundred yards up the hill. It was the next major intersection ahead, and therefore the next decision point for Ross unless he went into a building or turned down a little alleyway.
“Might be taking the towpath,” said Nolan.
Beale said, “Shit. You’re right. If he does, we’ll lose the eye here in a second.”
To both men’s surprise, however, Ethan Ross made a quick right off 31st Street into a narrow alley that led back over to Thomas Jefferson. Their taxi had been the unit stationed on Thomas Jefferson a couple minutes before, so they knew there would be no eye on their subject on the far side of that alley.
Beale called it in to control, who replied it would take at least ninety seconds to move a vehicle back onto Thomas Jefferson.
“Shit,” Beale muttered to Nolan. “Do I follow through the alley?”
Nolan hesitated. Then said, “Just pull up and take a look from the street. Don’t want to get stuck in a one-lane alleyway if we don’t have to.”
The cab stopped at the mouth of the alley; in the distance Ross was already more than halfway to Thomas Jefferson.
Beale said, “We’re gonna lose him. He can grab the towpath or head back down to K or up to M or he could—”
“Go!” ordered Nolan.
The cab pulled into the narrow alley just as Ross made a left a hundred yards in front of them.
“I’ll call it in,” said Beale. He rolled slowly, keeping his eyes peeled left and right in case Ross had a spotter helping him on his dry-cleaning run. While he drove he touched his finger to his earpiece. “Control hub, this is Uniform Victor. We are eastbound to T Jeff. Subject just made a left out of an alley. Still on foot.”
“Roger.” As the hub scrambled to route another vehicle into the area, Beale picked up speed in the little alley, hoping he’d be able to catch a helpful glimpse of Ross before he reached a decision point and disappeared from view. But as he passed the midway point through the alleyway, he had to slow because a pair of big garbage dumpsters were positioned along the wall on his left, cutting his clearance down to less than a foot.
Just as he drew abreast with the cans, a large dusty blue van backed out of a covered parking lot in front of him and stopped just feet from the grille of his cab.
Beale had to slam on his brakes to avoid a collision.
He lowered his window. “Move it, asshole!”
Nolan looked back over his shoulder and saw a sedan with tinted windows pull into the alleyway behind them. It stopped twenty feet back, blocking the cab in next to the dumpsters.
Beale saw the second car as well, and instantly he knew this was some sort of an ambush.
“I’m ramming them!” Beale slammed the transmission into reverse, because the sedan was smaller, lighter, and a few feet farther away than the van.
“Do it!” urged Nolan.
But before Beale could step on the gas, two men in black masks and black wool coats stepped out from between the dumpsters, just a foot from the driver’s side of the taxi. As one, they raised black pistols with long silencers.
Nolan screamed, “Watch out!”
Behind them the sedan driver leaned on his horn, masking the sound as the two masked men opened fire on the cab, peppering both the driver’s-side and the passenger windows with round after round from their suppressed pistols.
The two SSG surveillance officers crumpled onto the seats next to them. The cab rolled back a few feet and came to rest gently against the parked sedan, which was no longer blaring its horn.
IRANIAN QUDS FORCE OPERATIVES Ormand and Kashan quickly slipped their weapons back inside their coats. With no words between the two gunmen, they reached through the broken windows and opened both the front and back doors. They pushed the bloody American bodies farther inside the car and out of their way. Ormand climbed behind the wheel, while Kashan sat in the back. They rolled down the broken windows, cleared away shattered glass from the doors, and watched while Shiraz moved the van out of the way in front of them, and then turned toward Thomas Jefferson.
The cab followed suit behind, making a right at the mouth of the alley.
Behind them, Isfahan climbed out of the sedan with a long device in his hands that looked something like a metal broom. It was a NailHawg magnetic nail sweeper, used by roofers for collecting loose roofing nails in grass. Quickly and calmly he rolled the device back and forth in the alley where his two colleagues had been standing, and he picked up eleven spent shell casings from their weapons.
He was back in his sedan a moment later, heading down the alley to 31st street.
BEFORE THE FOUR IRANIAN assassins had even left the neighborhood, Ethan Ross entered in side door of the Venezuelan embassy two blocks away on 30th Street, completely unaware of what had happened behind him, and completely undetected by either U.S. intelligence or law enforcement.
28
FOR THE FIRST FEW hours Ethan Ross sat alone in a windowless office on the ground floor of the Venezuelan embassy. He was given coffee and then a snack and finally a meal— Vietnamese food from a restaurant on M Street—and he sat alone at a conference table and ate. All the while—more than five hours in place, and no one interviewed him, interrogated him, or did anything more than peek in on him from time to time to see to his needs. So he sat at conference table or on a small sofa next to it the entire time, his backpack looped around his arms and hanging off his chest, protecting the pack that held his computer and other equipment as if it were an infant.
At around nine p.m. an attractive woman in her twenties entered the office—Ethan had pegged her earlier as an intelligence officer—and with a smile she invited Gianna Bertoli into the small room. Ethan stood to hug her, not because he needed the Swiss woman’s comforting embrace but rather because he knew Gianna would offer a hug.
Ethan was happy for the chance to find out what was going on from someone he trusted. “Where have you been? How much longer am I going to be sitting here?”
Gianna sat back down at the conference table with him. “I’ve been here all day. Mostly upstairs in conference calls with agents here in the embassy as well as counterintelligence agents in Caracas.”
“What’s taking so long?”
“It was all going smoothly, but then some sort of a problem developed on the streets outside.”
“What sort of problem?”
“Police. A lot of police. For the first hour or two the Venezuelans thought they were looking for you. They began to grow concerned about this entire enterprise, thinking if the Americans knew about you already, then they would have a hard time getting you out of the country. They talked of contacting the State Department and turning you over. I insisted that the intelligence you have would make it worth their while, but they remained noncommittal.”
“Bastards.”
“It’s okay. It seems whatever is going on here in Georgetown is unrelated to you. The police are looking for a taxi with two occupants, but they aren’t providing any more information than that. This placated the Venezuelans, and everything is back on track.”
Just then, the door opened again, and a tall, handsome Latin American man with salt-and-pepper hair entered, trailed by the female intelligence officer Ethan had met earlier. He introduced himself as Arturo, and Ethan determined instantly he was General Intelligence Office, the foreign arm of Venezuelan intelligence. He offered Ross and Bertoli coffee, and another good-looking female brought it in a moment later.
There was a little small talk. Ethan asked questions about the police presence out in the streets, but Arturo knew no more than Gianna had already told him.
Soon the small talk trailed off and Arturo got down to business. “Now, Mr. Ross. We agree to your terms—we wi
ll remove you safely from the United States and take you to Caracas, where you will be both protected and free to come and go whenever you wish.” He held up a finger. “With the provision you provide documentary evidence of all American agents working for the CIA in Venezuela.”
Ethan shook his head. “No. I will not give you everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I will give you a portion of what I have.” Ethan smiled. “But it will be more than enough to keep your organization busy, I promise you that. Once I’m safely in Venezuela, I’ll give you the rest.”
The truth was, Ethan had no idea what sources the CIA had in Venezuela. He’d never given it a moment’s thought. He felt certain there would be something, however, and even if he had to give every last shred of relevant intelligence to Arturo right now and lie about there being more on the drive, he was going to do whatever it took to get a ticket out of the USA, tonight.
“Muy bien,” said Arturo. “What do you need from us?”
“I need an office with a printer. I will print out the files from my computer.”
Arturo took him down a staircase, to a door off a basement lobby, and he unlocked the door with a card key. With a flourish he bowed and Ethan stepped alone into a small dormitory room, with a computer and a printer on a simple desk against the wall. Arturo closed the door, leaving Ethan alone inside.
He put his laptop on the desk, then pulled the comforter off the bed. He threw the comforter over his head, covering the laptop as well. This way, if there were hidden cameras in the room they wouldn’t see him enter his password.
He had the NASCAR drive in his backpack, but he did not retrieve it. Instead, he reached down inside the front of his pants and felt along his waist, just above his left hip. He pulled a small, flesh-colored moleskin bandage off his skin and then brought it out of his pants. Stuck to the inside of it was a tiny micro SD card, roughly the size of a fingernail. He pried it from the moleskin and placed it into an SC card adapter from his backpack.
He’d come up with the scheme to hide the scrape on his own, and he’d transferred the files from the NASCAR drive during his several hours this morning after leaving Fort Marcy Park. Now the NASCAR drive was blank, as was his computer, but both devices were heavily encrypted, so anyone attempting to recover the Intelink-TS files would have no way of knowing Ethan had relocated them to a tiny device he kept hidden on his body.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but Ethan liked feeling like he had some semblance of control over events.
Once his computer read the micro SD card, he entered a series of passwords, and soon he was in. It took three minutes to pull up a massive cataloged database—U.S. top-secret intelligence out of Intelink-TS. He typed in some search terms into a wiki-like program, waited an instant for the search engine to do its thing, and then he smiled.
In front of him was a mother lode of intelligence about U.S. assets in Venezuela, all well categorized and easy to sort and read. As he scrolled through page after page of raw intel source documents, he saw there were no names—per se—because they were redacted before going onto the network—but the identities of specific agents could be quite easily discerned.
One file relayed the CIA’s relationship with the assistant manager of the Caracas office of Conviasa, the state-owned national air carrier of Venezuela. Another file dealt with two concierges at the Gran Meliá Caracas hotel who’d been passing information to Langley for years. A series of documents defining an operation that utilized help from the chief of police of the city of Maracaibo.
Ethan even saw that the assistant deputy minister of Interior and Justice was a CIA agent on the take.
The files went on and on. It took more than an hour, but eventually Ethan pulled up hundreds of documents from CIA files, giving vague but identifiable personalities of thirty-three agents in Venezuela, and he printed them all out. He could have kept working and pulled another fifty or sixty names, but he wanted to save the rest for when he got to Caracas.
He spent several more minutes clearing all his history on his computer and then signing out and shutting down. When he was finished he took off the sheet, put the drive back in the moleskin, and reattached it to his hip. He threw the backpack onto his shoulder and then left the room, heading back upstairs to the office.
Gianna Bertoli, the CIO officer who had introduced himself as Arturo, and two young female Venezuelans looked up from the sofas where they were sitting. Ethan noticed a pair of young men in suits standing by the elevators in the lobby down the hall now. He assumed they were security, and he appreciated their presence, but he wasn’t one hundred percent certain they weren’t here to keep him in as opposed to keeping others out.
Arturo stood from the conference table. “So, what do you have for us?”
Ethan handed over the printed pages and said, “A list of twenty-three Venezuelan citizens and ten foreign nationals living in Venezuela who were all in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thirty-three men and women, mostly in Caracas, who are currently spying on the Venezuelan government.”
One of the women spoke softly: “Increíble.”
Arturo started going through the pages silently. Ethan looked to Bertoli, but he addressed the Venezuelans. “This is just the tip of the iceberg, believe me. Once I get somewhere safe, I can get you more identities, a list of front companies in Venezuela, CIA informants working at your consular offices all over the world, and information about CIA’s reach into Venezuela’s oil and banking sectors.” Ethan raised his eyebrows. “It’s really interesting stuff. I should think you would want to see it.”
Arturo nodded gravely. “I very much do want to see it.” Then he smiled. “I agree to your terms. We will leave for Caracas at once.”
“Excellent,” said Bertoli.
DOM SAT ALONE in his condo, thinking about going out for a night on the town. He wasn’t in the mood for it, really, but this afternoon he’d done little more than sit around, and he felt like getting out.
Adara Sherman had stopped by an hour earlier. Dom didn’t answer the door; he knew it was her because, through the blinds, he saw her car parked outside. His place was a mess and he didn’t feel like having company, especially company who had dropped in on him only to check him out and evaluate his physical and mental state for his boss, Gerry Hendley.
Dom didn’t think either his physical or his mental state should be on display at the moment.
Just as he stood to head into his bedroom to change for a few hours of bar hopping, there was a new knock at the door. At first he thought Sherman had returned; he groaned, but figured he might as well let her in and get it over with. But when he looked through the peephole he saw a familiar man wearing a dark blue suit.
He opened the door. “Albright.”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course.”
Albright didn’t sit down; instead, he just stood in Dom’s living room, his hands on his hips.
Caruso assumed the special agent brought some news. Albright’s body language was all wrong for someone who was going to either gloat or celebrate. No, Dom knew before he said a word, Albright was here because something bad had happened.
“I thought you should know,” he said. “It looks like you were right about Ethan Ross.”
Dom raised an eyebrow. “How did you figure that out?”
“His girlfriend.”
“She’s in on it?”
“Not looking like it.”
“Why not?”
“Found her body in Ross’s living room. Shot once in the torso. DRT.” Caruso knew DRT was unofficial cop speak meaning “dead right there.”
Caruso blew out a gasp. “Who did it? Ross?”
“I don’t know. No record of him having a gun . . . but you know how that is. A guy who wants to kill somebody can find a gun easily enough.”
“That’s true.”
“We’ll investigate all possibilities.”
Dom didn’t understand the
comment. He asked, “Where is Ross now?”
“Disappeared.”
Caruso looked at the ceiling in frustration.
“And we’ve lost a couple of SSG guys during the hunt.”
“What the hell does that mean? Lost?”
“They, and the taxi they were in, vanished about three o’clock this afternoon, just prior to SWAT moving in for an arrest. If Ross killed Pang to silence her, he would have had no compunction about killing to save himself.”
“Yeah.”
“I know what you are thinking, Caruso.”
“I bet you do.”
“You are thinking this is my fault. You are telling yourself if we just grabbed Ross by the throat the first time you mentioned his name, Pang would still be alive, and my two guys wouldn’t be missing.”
Dom did not reply.
“We don’t operate under black-ops rules in the FBI. You might have forgotten that, but it’s the law.”
“Yeah. I used to be a law-and-order man myself,” Dom said. “It only gets you so far.”
“That’s a dangerous thing to say to me, Caruso.”
“I just think you should have bent the rules a little with this one, Albright. Shaken a little harder.”
Albright kept his hands on his hips, his eyes on Caruso.
Dom softened. He shouldn’t have been so hard on the guy. He was doing his best. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Yes. You can give me your gun. I want to run ballistics on it.”
“What?”
“Look. It’s just to rule you out. I don’t think for a moment the President’s nephew murdered Eve Pang, but you are an armed man running wild through the middle of all this shit, so I would be a fool if I didn’t as least check of the box that says you’re clean.”
Caruso thought about protesting, but he knew that would just make Albright get a warrant and come back. So he stepped to his bookshelf, grabbed his shoulder rig out of its hiding spot, and pulled his Smith & Wesson from its holster. He dropped the magazine out, racked the slide to eject the round in the chamber, and locked the gun open. He handed it to Albright. “I want a receipt for that.”