A black Range Rover screeched to a halt in the bus lane, just to Midas’s left. Adara ran past Midas and climbed into the backseat of Clark’s vehicle, and Midas himself jumped in the front passenger seat.
As soon as they climbed inside, the Nissan Pathfinder, now seventy or eighty yards behind them, rolling at idle in the bus lane, exploded with an incredible boom. As all three in the Range Rover ducked, bits of debris struck the vehicle and burning shrapnel crashed down all around.
Adara looked back and realized that the only thing that saved them from taking more of the massive detonation was that the Nissan had been behind a parked Metro bus when it blew up.
—
Clark did not race away instantly. He could see blood running down Midas’s forearm, streaks of blood on his T-shirt, and Adara had blood all over her white summer blouse.
“Where’s Eddie?” Clark asked.
“Sorry, John,” Adara said. “He’s gone. I tried to save him, but there was nothing I could do.”
Only now did Clark step on the gas. He drove quickly, but in a manner that wouldn’t give passersby who didn’t know better a hint anyone inside the black Range Rover had been involved in the gun battle at the station.
“How badly are you two injured?”
Midas asked, “Adara?”
“I’m unhurt. Midas is wounded. Covered in blood. We need to get him to a hospital.”
“Negative,” Midas said. “Just took a bump from that Pathfinder. Most of this blood is from one of the Crows.”
“One of the what?” Adara asked.
“Crows. The bad guys.” It was Delta Force talk, and Adara hadn’t heard it before.
Clark made a right onto Prince Street, but he knew he’d need to make fifty turns in the next ten minutes to have any prayer of clearing this scene and being certain they weren’t being followed. Plus, they’d have to switch vehicles and, more than anything, avoid returning to the office for the rest of the day, if not the week. He listened to the heavy breathing of the two trainees, then asked, “Who the hell did this?”
Midas said, “Four unsubs. I only got a good look at the one I stuck. He was twentyish, small, olive, dark hair, but lighter skin. Could have been Turkish or something. Hard to say.”
Adara added, “The guy who Laird shot . . . when I ran by him I got a good look. I’d be surprised if he was seventeen years old.”
“Middle Eastern descent?”
“Or North African. Yeah,” she said, distractedly. And then, “I’m so sorry, John. I tried to get Laird behind some cover, but he pulled his weapon and engaged.”
“What weapons did you see on the hostiles?” Clark asked, desperately looking for any indicator about the identity of the attackers.
Midas said, “Full-auto Uzis, and I saw a Glock.”
Adara nodded in the backseat. “I saw the same. Handguns and sub guns. Mr. Laird killed one of the men.”
Clark just nodded. “Good for Eddie.” Then he slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “Who the hell was after him?”
No one responded, because no one had a clue.
34
John Clark, Adara Sherman, and Barry “Midas” Jankowski climbed out of Clark’s black Range Rover as it rolled to a stop at an employee entrance to Tysons Corner Center, a large shopping mall just twenty minutes from the shoot-out in Alexandria. Clark left the driver’s-side door open and a bearded man in his forties climbed behind the wheel without saying a word, and then he drove the SUV out of the parking lot and back onto the interstate.
The man was Dave Fleming, one of the Campus security officers. He would drive the Range Rover west, halfway across Virginia, to get it out of the area. He’d park the vehicle on some land owned by one of The Campus’s shell companies and then wait to be picked up by Pablo Gomez, another of the security staff. Together they’d return to the D.C. area tonight in Gomez’s silver ’69 Pontiac Firebird.
Clark, Adara, and Midas stepped into the side entrance of the mall and immediately turned into the Eddie Bauer store, just feet away. The adventure-wear location was managed by Dave Fleming’s twenty-five-year-old son, Pete. Pete was a former member of the U.S. Army 75th Ranger Regiment, who had returned to the D.C. area to work on his master’s at Georgetown with an eye toward future work with the Agency.
A quick call from Clark to Chavez, and then from Chavez to the young man running the clothing store, ensured that the manager was the only person in the store when three individuals walked in, changed into brand-new clothes, and walked out the back employee door, all within two or three minutes.
Only when the three had departed did Pete Fleming notice small blood droplets on the cheap tile floor of the stockroom.
Chavez was waiting behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer with tinted windows outside the exit to the Eddie Bauer stockroom. When he had all three loaded he drove a couple of miles to a safe house kept by The Campus on Turkey Run Road, just a few hundred yards from CIA headquarters in the unincorporated subdivision of Langley.
Jack Ryan, Jr., and Dom Caruso were already waiting at the safe house, armed with sub guns hanging from their shoulders and a hell of a lot of questions about what had just happened on the fifth day of training the team’s new recruits.
Adara came through the garage door holding a bloody compress on Midas’s arm, and she had time only to make an instant of intense eye contact with Dom before going into the kitchen and commandeering the table there to use as a treatment area for the ex–Delta officer.
While the others stood around the kitchen, Midas pulled off his shirt and dropped his pants, but only after the insistence from Adara and the gravelly seconding of Adara’s request by John Clark.
“Damn, brother,” Ding Chavez said when he saw Midas’s left hip and thigh. The area was bright purple in the center, fading to a dull gray, and the bruise was over a foot and a half in length. “How the hell did you just walk in here?”
Midas shrugged. “Nothing’s broken. It might ache a little tomorrow.”
Clark said, “You aren’t in the Unit anymore, son. You’re allowed to say ouch.”
Midas cracked a thin smile. “Well, then . . . ouch.”
Gerry Hendley marched through the front door of the safe house with Gavin Biery, followed by Dale Henson and Jason Gibson, two more security men from The Campus, who entered only after making sure the garage door was secure. The security officers took up positions that gave them a view out the front and back doors of the property, and they pulled short-barreled rifles chambered in the powerful 300 Blackout round from discreet deployment bags. They then slung their rifles over their shoulders and took up watch. Gerry was on the phone, but he found the group in the kitchen converged around Midas, who stood there by the table in his Lycra underwear.
“Hey, boss,” Jankowski said awkwardly.
Gerry lowered the phone for a moment while he surveyed Midas’s injury to his hip. “If I had to guess, I’d say that came from the driver’s side of a black Nissan Pathfinder.”
Midas’s eyes went wide for an instant, as did Adara’s, but almost instantly both recognized where Gerry had gotten his information.
Midas said, “Shit. Security camera?”
Gerry nodded. “Yep. Gavin had it pulled up in seconds.”
Biery said, “Nothing to worry about. The quality isn’t good enough to ID anyone from any of the angles. You guys are safe on that front. I’ve also got guys back at the office monitoring social media tags, different cloud services, and the like. If anybody puts video or stills of the event online, we’ll check them instantly to be ready to censor.”
Gavin looked at Midas, a man he’d met only once. “I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. I watched that impact about five times. You spun through the air for a second like a Marvel superhero.”
Midas looked down at his purple hip. “Thanks, but superheroes don’t slap face-first
into the pavement after a second.”
Gerry stepped away, continuing his call, while the others watched Adara work on a long gash on Midas’s forearm. She then strapped a big bag of ice to his hip with an Ace bandage from her orange medic kit, transported from the office to her by Dom.
Gerry hung up the phone and walked over. “Do you need stitches, Barry?”
“No, sir. Seems Ms. Sherman has me squared away like the pro she is.”
Hendley and Clark both looked at Adara. They knew to trust her judgment on emergency medical matters. Adara wouldn’t sugarcoat things, nor would she make a bigger deal out of them than necessary.
But the blonde leaning over her patient shook her head. “He’ll be fine. But, like he said, tomorrow won’t be a good one for him. That hip is going to swell, even with the ice. He got lucky with the lacerations on his arm. He must have caught the rearview mirror or something on the SUV that hit him, but I was able to fold the skin back into place, and it will heal nicely. He has some road rash and bruising on his chest and knees, but nothing to worry about.”
Midas said, “I’ve survived six IEDs, I can survive getting knocked to the pavement by a dickhead in a Nissan.”
Clark asked, “What about you, Adara? You were right in the middle of all that.”
“I’m fine. Not a scratch.” She stole a quick look at Dom, who didn’t hide the relief he felt. She added, “I just wish I could have done something for Mr. Laird.”
Gerry Hendley said, “That tough son of a bitch survived the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968 and he survived the embassy bombing in Beirut in 1983. But he didn’t survive a morning walk in Virginia in 2017.”
Adara said, “He went down fighting. He killed one of them.”
Gerry nodded. “Doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Now Gerry relayed what he learned on the phone. “D.C. police have three dead terrorists at the scene. Another possible body behind the wheel of the SUV that blew up. Two dead civilians, including Eddie Laird, and two dead D.C. transit officers. Eight other civilians injured, and a transit officer who took some shrapnel through the hand.”
“Christ Almighty,” muttered Adara.
Gerry looked at Gavin and Jack now. “Any chance Laird could be one of the intelligence professionals caught up in this big leak affecting so many the past few weeks?”
Jack hadn’t been there when it happened, but he felt like he had something worth saying. “I don’t think so.”
Chavez asked, “Why do you say that?”
“We think the leak is coming from SF-86 applications housed on a supposedly secure network at the Office of Personnel Management. The digital records only go back to 1984. If this guy was in the CIA in Nam, I’m going to assume he received his classified access a long time before ’84.”
Clark said, “There’s something you don’t know. Eddie’s daughter, Regina Laird, is also with the CIA. She was Naval Intelligence but joined the Agency five years back. Gina’s SF-86 will have her dad’s employer listed.”
Jack understood now. “Well, then, that changes things.”
Chavez said, “It also means, not only does somebody have to tell Eddie’s daughter that her dad’s been murdered, but also that her career in covert ops is over.”
Gerry turned to Jack now. “Are you suggesting that somebody out there has all these records, and they have the ability to take this raw data to find out where that person is now and what they are doing?”
“That’s it, exactly.”
Jack saw that his cousin Dom had the same confused look on his face that Jack himself had worn when Gavin had first suggested this.
“ISIS has these skills?” Dom asked.
Gavin chimed in to answer. “Not a chance in hell. Jack and I are working under the assumption that a private group has exploited this data. They then sold or gave a piece of the intel to a Russian kid whose brother died on a sub sunk in the Baltic. Then, after that, they’ve been using the material as the foundation of high-level identity intelligence exploitation, creating individual targeting packages, probably for money, but perhaps for other motivations. They’ve passed these packages off to several state actors, and now it seems they’ve given a large amount of information to Islamic State operatives in Europe and the U.S.”
Chavez thought over the scope of it all. “Hell . . . everybody in this room has filled out an SF-86.”
Jack Ryan shook his head. “Except me.”
Clark considered the irony. “Right, the famous guy is okay. But those of us who haven’t been in People magazine are now more famous than we want to be.”
“I was fourteen with braces the last time I was in People,” Jack said. “Still, I wouldn’t worry about you guys getting caught up in this breach. There are a lot of files this bad actor has to wade through, and any research he does into the present-day status of you all shows you work for a private equity management firm in Virginia. Your careers in corporate security and logistical operations are supported by all the right documentation. No, these bad guys are focusing on people still in the game or, in the case of Todd Braxton, still touting what they did to Islamic radicals.”
Gerry said, “But if what you say is true, that means there are tens of thousands of men and women who could be in danger right now. Have you gone to the DNI with this yet?”
Jack said, “No, sir. We just put this together ourselves yesterday, and wanted to test our assumptions a bit. The NSA doesn’t believe the OPM has been hacked, but Gavin has all but ruled out anything else.”
“Well, I’d say it’s time to talk to Mary Pat. She can make the decision if Dan Murray should know about your identity intelligence exploitation theory, but from what I’m hearing from my contacts in the IC, nobody else has found anything solid.”
Jack and Gavin looked at each other and nodded. Jack wasn’t as sure their theory was ready for prime time as Gavin was, but still he said, “We’ll write something up to present just as soon as we get back to the office, but I think I should stay here to help with security for the time being.”
Gerry turned to Clark. “I’d like to get him back on the analytical side as soon as possible.”
Clark said, “I agree. Jack, we’re fine with the security we have here. You and Gavin can take off, but do an SDR before returning to the office. We’re going to stay here till this evening, monitor the news and investigations. If we’re clear, we’ll move then. I might take Midas and Adara to my place tonight, just to get them out of town.”
Gerry said, “I’ll talk to Dan Murray as soon as I can get him on the phone, see what he can do to dial down any heat on us about what just happened in Alexandria. Anybody looking at security cameras up and down King Street will see Adara and Midas tailing Eddie before the hit. Dan needs to know you two are on our team and you neutralized the threats this morning.” Gerry then asked, “John, what about your Range Rover? It was seen at the Metro station.”
Clark shrugged. “There are five thousand just like it around here. Still . . . I guess it’s a good excuse for an upgrade. I’ll run that by Sandy.” With a shake of his head he said, “A good man died today. A man who served his country well. Just like Jennifer Kincaid. I know the government will be doing its best to get some payback for this, but I’d sure as hell like for us to be involved in that, too. Gerry, if Jack and Gavin can get us someone to focus on from their investigation, I hope you’ll allow us to prosecute that target.”
Gerry said, “Considering the obvious fact that covert U.S. government operators are exposed by this, I feel pretty sure Mary Pat would appreciate our assistance right through to the end. And I’ve got no problem with that, at all. If Jack and Gavin can get us targets, I’ll secure Mary Pat’s approval and get us involved in the hunt.”
35
Late in the afternoon in a third-floor office occupying a corner of a drab square concrete building on Bucharest’s Strada Doctor Pa
leologu, Alexandru Dalca watched the live news reports from America on his computer.
He did this just after checking his foreign bank accounts and confirming that he had become a rich man in the past week. Two deposits of $5 million for twenty-four American targets.
He smiled. Before these deposits he had about one million in his account, money he’d earned in the past year working on commission for ARTD, and here as a single man in Bucharest he’d been living like a multimillionaire, but finally his bank account actually mirrored his lifestyle.
But as much as he enjoyed looking at his money, he was surprised by the feeling that the actions in America were even more satisfying to him. He enjoyed the payback against America, the nation that sent him to prison years ago. And he was also pleased that he had correctly assumed whom he had been corresponding with all this time. Already connections were being made between the Islamic State and the attacks. Not because the Americans were smart—Dalca didn’t think Americans were smart at all. No, the connections among the first three attacks were made only via the propaganda video ISIS had released proving their complicity in them all.
The ISIS guys, as he liked to call them, had taken out Barbara Pineda and Michael Wayne, and though they royally fucked up the Todd Braxton assassination, they lucked out and killed someone arguably more famous to the Americans.
Dalca wasn’t the introspective or self-critical type, so he didn’t spend much time musing about the fact he deserved some of the blame for the error in the Braxton hit. His research into Braxton’s day-to-day activities told him the man was traveling to the movie set every day with Danny Phillips, but Dalca wasn’t much of a movie person himself, and he didn’t consider the fact that Phillips would have changed his appearance to look like Braxton.
He’d found out details of Braxton’s location with more ease than most of the other targets. Specifically, he used Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and other social media accounts. Just three days before the hit Braxton had posted a picture of himself on Twitter sitting in the back of a big black SUV, saying his entourage was on the way to the set in the Mojave Desert. In the background of the image Dalca had identified a Starbucks sign, and then by using the location metadata saved onto the digital image itself, he’d ID’d the coffee shop as being located at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Riverside Drive in Los Angeles. In his picture Braxton had the big muttonchops that were in all the hundreds of other photos Dalca had found of the man taken within the past three years, and Dalca had included similar photos in the targeting package sent to the ISIS guys.