Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

“Spare me the formalities. My gun and badge are already on...

“Let’s go, boys,” she said.

The FBI team sent by Deputy Director Raymond Dahlgren to seize Gideon Davis surrounded the Virginia welcome station with more than thirty men. The signal on the secure phone that Nancy Clement had given him had not moved in twenty-four minutes.

Teams were dispatched to lock down the men’s bathroom, the ladies’ bathroom, both doors of the welcome station itself, as well as the candy station. In addition, a roving group accompanied by a canine “agent” patrolled rapidly down the line of cars. The canine had been given a shirt believed to have been worn by Gideon Davis in the hope it might pick up a scent trail.

The dog pounced on a van before the entry teams had gotten situated around the welcome station. The canine team was forced to breach the vehicle while the other teams raced for the welcome station.

After eleven El Salvadoran nationals emerged from the van, the nearly uncontrollable dog had invaded the vehicle where it discovered half a kilo of low-grade Mexican tar heroin concealed inside a hollowed-out stack of Brazilian pornographic magazines.

Meanwhile, women had begun to scream, children were running, tiny dogs were escaping from their owners—in short, all hell was breaking loose as the various teams attempted to raid the welcome center.

It took nearly thirty minutes to gain control of the situation, with the result that a great many perfectly innocent travelers, including one Japanese consular official, were held on their knees at gunpoint. The consular official, a former national judo champion who did not share the conciliatory nature of most of his countrymen, spent a good ten minutes screaming at the chief of the HRT unit in his excellent English that he was going to lodge a formal complaint with the State Department.

It was only then that Gideon Davis’s cell phone was finally located, lodged behind a stack of brochures for Colonial Williamsburg.

27

WASHINGTON, DC

Special Agent Shanelle Greenfield Klotz liked to claim that she hated dog-and-pony shows. But the fact was, she was enormously talented at them, in large part because she enjoyed conducting them. She was a small, thin woman—as a matter of record, the smallest, lightest sworn agent in the entire Secret Service.

She was also—again, this was a matter of record—the smartest. At least as measured by the IQ test given to every prospective agent in the Secret Service. She was also the only biracial half-black, half-Jew in the Secret Service and generally recognized as the Service’s leading expert in facilities security. She was, by any measure, an odd bird. Despite that, it was nearly impossible to find anyone who would bad-mouth her. Everybody in the Secret Service loved the shit out of her.

When she was eleven years old, Shanelle had come home crying one day from school. Her grandfather, Grandpa Joe Greenfield, asked her what was wrong, and she had said, “Grandpa Joe, everybody hates me!”

̶ghtttttt t‡0;Kiddo,” Grandpa Joe said, “your problem is you’re a smarty-pants. Nobody likes a smarty-pants. The secret, you want to be liked, you gotta be a mensch.”

This was the first time Shanelle could recall having heard the word. “What’s a mensch, Grandpa Joe?”

“Boiled down? He’s your unpretentious guy who gives a shit about other people. He don’t dress too snappy. He don’t make people feel dumb. He don’t make ’em feel funny-looking. He don’t ever make ’em feel small. He asks ’em how they’re doing. Then when they tell him, he listens. Just do that, and you can get away with murder.” Moidah, that was the way Grandpa Joe pronounced it. He winked and pulled a silver dollar out of her ear. “See? I should know.”

Shanelle had never forgotten the lesson.

As far as the world could see, she had become a mensch at age eleven. But, in her heart, she was still a smarty-pants. Which was why, although she would never admit it, she loved doing a dog-and-pony show. Because it was one of the few things in her life where she could just be a straight-up smarty-pants and people would thank her for it.

Her visitor was a spare, spiderlike man, Captain Fred Steele, the liaison for the District of Columbia Police Department. Steele was responsible for securing and monitoring the outermost perimeter, roughly five square miles, during the State of the Union address. Although there would be only limited coordination between his agency and the Secret Service, Shanelle had invited him here to get an overview of their protocols. She led the visitor through a full-body scanner, past two Secret Service agents, and through a pair of heavy oak doors into the House Chamber.

“The presidential security operation,” Special Agent Klotz said, “provided by the United States Secret Service, is the largest, most thorough, most expensive, and most extensively trained executive protection detail anywhere. Other than the inauguration of a president, no single event consumes a greater share of the attention and resources of the Secret Service than the State of the Union address. Not only is the president in attendance, but so is the entire top layer of the United States government. Other than one so-called ‘designated survivor’—a member of the president’s cabinet, who is holed up in a secure location outside Washington, DC—all the rest of the top players in the government attend the speech, including virtually the entire House and Senate, the entire Supreme Court, and the cabinet.”

They strolled up the aisle toward the podium where the president would deliver his speech to the nation in less than twenty-four hours.

“The president’s speech, mandated by custom as well as by the Constitution, is given every year, except for the year of a president’s inauguration, in the House chambers of the US Capitol.”

Captain Steele eyed the large room. She sensed he was considering how a terrorist might use the terrain of the semicircular arrangement of the room to kill the president.

“To give you a sense of what we do to protect POTUS, I’ll describe the various security rings. First of all, we surround the principal with a team whose job is to protect his person and the immediate space around him. That interior circle is manned exclusively by Secret Service personnel. Next we maintain a secondary ="0ce ring to control and monitor the surrounding crowd, constantly scanning the venue for potential threats. Again, that’s all Secret Service—although in this facility there’s some assistance from the Capitol Police. Finally, we maintain a third security ring, which protects the grounds, the surrounding buildings, vehicles, perimeter entry and egress. Ideally, that ring is roughly half a mile in diameter. For the State of the Union address, it’s even larger. Which is why we’re enlisting the resources of your department along with FBI, Capitol Police—not to mention Air Force and FAA elements to monitor and control the airspace around the Capitol. Plus, while I can’t get into specifics, one might presume there is a standby tactical force from, say, Delta or the SEALs or the FBI’s HRT unit.

“Now, my modest little area of expertise is facilities. In a perfect world, I’d have torn this place down and built it from the ground up. Blast walls, air locks, filtration systems, cameras, sally ports. That’s my little fantasy, you know, putting them all in a bunker. But unfortunately, I live in the real world. My job is made a little trickier because the US Capitol was designed in the late eighteenth century, without a shred of concern for security. It’s been redesigned and rebuilt four or five times since. It’s not commonly known, but there are secret passages, underground spaces that were bricked over a century ago, spaces behind walls, unused vents. From a security perspective, it’s a complete nightmare.

“So we just have to grind it out. We work our way through every aspect of this building. Structural, mechanical, the electrical and plumbing and heating systems. Every bit of it has to be examined and reexamined. Visually inspected if possible. If not, then using a number of imaging technologies.”

“What about sweeping for bombs?” the visitor asked. “What are the protocols for controlling access?”

This is a heavily trafficked public facility, so there are limits. That puts the pressure on us to conduct intense screenings and scans during the twenty-four hours prior to the speech. That’s what we’re doing now.” She pointed to a man waving a wandlike device over the rear wall of the building. “We use all the standard technologies: nonlinear junction detectors, chemical sampling devices, Geiger counters, IR scanners. We use RF detectors to search for two-way comms, bugs, and so on. We also jam all cell phone traffic on the mall. No calls in or out during the speech as well as during the arrival and departure of POTUS and the other principals. And for identifying bombs and other explosive material, sniffer dogs are still our best tool.”

“How do you control access?”

“Every person who passes through any door or checkpoint has been vetted and is on a master list. Plus, they all need to pass through full-body scans.”

“Even dignitaries?”

“Everyone.”

“What about mechanical failures, electrical problems, things of that nature?”

“There is a vetted list of federal employees who’ve been precleared to handle any infrastructure emergencies we might encounter. As a backup for more serious problems, contractors for all mechanical systems and subsystems maintain a list of on-call employees, all of them vetted and on standby. We have their pictures, fingerprints, and other pertinent informaint, ftion in the system so we can ID them if we need them. Electrical, plumbing, pipe fitters, heat and air, elevators, masonry, carpentry, roofing, even contractors for the subway system going from the Russell Senate Office Building to the Capitol. Same with fire and rescue personnel.”

“How many agents total?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you the exact number. But north of five hundred when you include all the duties involved, including comms, electronic countermeasures, transport, EPD, countersnipers, dog handlers, perimeter, tactical standby, logistics, civilian employees and so on. And when you add in Capitol Police, DC Metro, FBI, military . . .”

“Now I know what’s causing the deficit,” Captain Steele said.

Agent Klotz smiled. “Our counterparts in other countries think it’s overkill. But I can tell you that even with all this, I won’t sleep for twelve seconds tonight.”

Her cell phone rang, and she excused herself. Her husband was defrosting one of the six meals Shanelle had cooked on Sunday night and left for him and their daughters in the freezer, but he didn’t know how long to cook it.

“Men,” she said after she hung up. But it was clear she took great pleasure in being needed. “If you’d like, we can go over the rest of tomorrow’s protocols in my office.”

28

PRIEST RIVER, IDAHO

Evan rolled aimlessly around the house. He felt full of an anxious, twitchy energy now that he was off the pills. His mind was a kaleidoscope of splintery questions about this whole ethanol thing with John Collier and his dad. Why had his father been so emotional? And what was up with the African woman who’d run out of the woods? None of the explanations quite made sense, but he hoped to find some answers in the woods. A few days earlier, he’d seen a pillar of smoke rising over the treetops a half mile away.

Outside the sky had gone leaden. A storm was gathering.

“I’m going outside for a while, Margie,” he said.

Margie stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “It’s too cold.”

“Just for a few minutes.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“Mr. Wilmot won’t allow it.”

“I am Mr. Wilmot,” he said with an edge in his voice that made her flinch. He felt the tiniest bit bad. It was kind of an asshole thing to say. But it was also true. He was not some kid who could be told what to do in his own house.

Other than a brief flash in her eyes, her big ham of a face did not move. “Your father would not allow it,” she repeated.

Evan rolled toward her, stopping only just short of whacking her on the shins. “I served my country through one tour of Iraq and two tours of Afghaniem“”“”“”" juststan, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to stop me from going out in my own yard.”

“Mr. Wilmot would not allow it.”

Evan slammed the joystick forward on his wheelchair, but Margie grabbed the arms of the chair and held it like a nose tackle on a blocking sled. The electric motor whined loudly, and after a moment the chair began to emit a burned rubber smell. Finally Evan let go of the joystick. It wouldn’t do him any good burning out the motor on his sled.

“All right, whatever,” he said. He hit the reverse on his joystick, backed up, and rolled to the chairlift that took him up the stairs to his room.

When he got upstairs, he called down the stairs, “If you’re going to be a pain in the ass, can you make me a sandwich? Ham and swiss on rye, okay? With a pickle.”

He knew that there was no rye bread in the kitchen, that the only rye bread in the house was in the basement freezer. He waited until he heard Margie clumping down into the basement, then rolled his wheelchair out onto the side balcony of the house. The house was built on a hillside. His father had installed a wheelchair ramp, but he’d never really used it because the hillside was too steep to navigate in the chair.

Today, though, he figured he’d be okay because the remnants of the last snow still left on the ground would slow the wheels of the chair and keep him from accelerating down the hill too fast and turning over.

He figured wrong. The minute he came off the ramp, he could feel that his center of gravity was too high. He slammed the joystick forward, hoping to power down the hill without tipping, but the wheels caught, and the chair went end over end down the hill.

Next thing he knew he was lying in a heap about eight feet from his overturned chair.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. Luckily he was unhurt. He had the wind knocked out of him, but that was about all. It was no worse than a good solid hit on the football field. He grinned and stared up at the ominous gray sky. It actually felt kind of good. “Pain is just the feeling of weakness leaving the body,” he said out loud, recalling one of the many goading comments that Master Sergeant Finch used to yell at everybody during Ranger training down at Benning.

He wormed himself across the ice over to the chair. Getting back into the chair took nearly five minutes of struggle. But curiously he didn’t feel daunted or angry or depressed the way he’d always felt doing therapy back at Walter Reed. In fact, he felt a steely determination, the same quality he thought had been blown away in the explosion.

Finally he settled back into the chair and moved down the walk, the nubby tires of the chair biting into the ice and snow with surprising efficiency.

Jesus but it was cold.

He’d put on a coat before leaving the house, but now his chest and hair and legs were wet from the snow he’d been lying on. And he should have worn a hat.

Nothing to do but keep moving.

He powered on down past the stables and onto the trail heading back into the forest. He was about five minutes down the trail when the first snow started falling. Within another ten minutes, the snow wa“0et=”s coming down so hard that he kept having to knock the flakes off his eyelashes in order to see. Visibility was down to thirty or forty feet.

He didn’t feel nervous, though. The wheelchair actually started riding better once half an inch of snow had accumulated. Soon, however, he was shivering.

But he was on a mission. He didn’t have gloves, but he’d pulled his ruined hand back inside the sleeve of his coat.

The snow was beautiful, sifting down out of the sky in fat gray-white lumps. Every sensation felt bold, sharp, clear. Even the cold and the lump on his head where he’d whacked himself in the fall lifted his spirits, made him feel complete for the first time in a long time.

Why the hell had he been sitting around feeling sorry for himself all this time? Yes, it sucked having no legs. Yes, it sucked having to rely on Nurse Margie. Yes, it sucked having a face like Freddy Krueger. But there were guys who didn’t make it back, who would never again feel the clear, bracing cold of a day like this.

He hummed to himself as he bumped down the trail. He realized the place was farther than he’d thought. The chair was all charged up, so it would be able to make it there and back. But still, as he got deeper into the forest, he couldn’t help feeling this was not the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life.

Finally, he came around a bend, and there it was: a large metal building that seemed unusually high. To the left was another structure, lower but longer than the first. Between them was some sort of massive air-conditioning unit, connected to the building by huge steel ducts. There seemed to be nothing going on, though. No African women, no vehicles, no steam coming from the chimneys, no lights. It was completely desolate.

He rolled to the taller building, found the door locked. There was a small window, but he couldn’t see in. He rolled to the second building. The door to this one was open. He looked inside. In one corner lay a very large pile of what appeared to be sweet potatoes. The rest of the building contained a variety of industrial machines. Judging from the work flow, it looked like the potatoes were going into some sort of masher, which piped something to large stainless steel vats, which then led to a number of smaller vats or cookers. There was a lot of stainless steel piping.

Could he have been wrong about his suspicions? Sweet potatoes, he knew, yielded even more ethanol than corn. Was that all that was going on out here? How stupid he had been. A wave of shame crashed over him as he realized how susceptible he’d been to some imagined conspiracy between Collier and his father. He wished he could call his father now and apologize for his misguided fears.

Evan turned his wheelchair around and went back outside. The wind had picked up a little. He touched his hair, found it frozen solid. He was shivering pretty hard now.

This was not so good. He needed to get back to the house.

He rolled out behind the two buildings, using them to shield himself from the wind. By the edge of the second one he found his father’s Cat D8 parked in the snow. Dale Wilmot had started in the business driving a Caterpillar, and he enjoyed using it around the property, knocking shit down or flattening ground. Like everything he did, the old man was a perfectionist with the Cat. Whether moving a pile of earth or digging a trench, his work was meticulous.

But here was a mess of broken earth, lumps and piles scattered here and there that hadn’t been entirely covered with snow. Since his father couldn’t have done this, he realized it must be Collier’s handiwork. But what had he been doing here? It looked like he’d been burying something. Maybe some kind of industrial residue that his father didn’t want dumped in the stream where he occasionally fished.

Evan rolled out over the lumpy ground, trying to get back onto the main path to the house. He pushed the chair sideways, spun it around, and then pushed it forward. For the first time since he’d left the house, the chair got stuck.

He backed up, then rolled forward, then backed up again. He cursed. The bottom of the chair had snagged on something. He rocked it back and forth, and felt a kindling fear in his belly.

If he got stuck out here, he was well and truly screwed. He leaned over and tried to look under the chair. But he couldn’t lean too far without the danger of pitching over, which would only make a bad situation worse. Now that he’d stopped, he noticed this his entire body was trembling from the cold. It was a deep, biting, bone-deep cold that felt raw and burned.

He tried to spin the chair around, but the tires wouldn’t grab the ground. The snow was coming down heavier, so hard that he could barely make out the Caterpillar, only five yards away.

Suddenly the chair broke free. He paused and turned to see what had caught him. It was a root, poking out of the ground.

Then his eyes widened. That was no root. It was a delicate black hand. A woman’s hand, dusted with frost.

He moved closer and could see the fingers curled, as if the woman had been trying to dig herself out of her frozen grave. It was one of the African women who had been working with Collier. Now she—and maybe everyone—was dead, judging from the size of the frozen bed of earth that surrounded him. What he’d discovered was far worse than his initial suspicion would have led him to imagine. But he still lacked the context to understand why this had happened or what Collier and his father were up to.

He blasted forward, heading back toward the metal buildings—or what he thought were the metal buildings. But when he reached the vague dark shapes rising above him, he realized it was just the edge of the woods.

He looked around and realized he’d lost his bearings. All he could see was the trees and the snow. He pushed forward along the tree line while the snow absorbed all sound around him. It was almost as if he were enduring some diabolical sensory deprivation experiment. The tires of the wheelchair spun as they tried to grip on the slippery surface. He halted momentarily, then pressed on.

A minute later the tires spun again. He jiggled the joystick, waiting for them to catch, but they just kept spinning. He looked down and saw that the wheels had cut a trench. The initial friction had melted the snow—which then refroze into a solid glaze of ice.

His heart was pounding now. He jiggled and rocked and yanked on the wheel with his hand. But nothing worked. Nearing panic, he pressed the joystick to the forward limit. The tires made a soft buzzing sound on the ice. But the chair didn’t move. And after another minute, he could hear the frequency of the wheels’ buzzing begin to lower slightly. He was running spat down the batteries.

“Help!” he called. “Margie! Can you hear me?”

But the deep silence of the forest was his only answer.

A sudden resolve eclipsed his fear as he realized that there was only one thing left to do. He unstrapped the Velcro straps from his legs and slid to the ground.

The cold ground burned the stumps of his legs. Since coming home, he’d refused to do the therapy that would have prepared his stumps for prosthetics, and as a result, they were uncallused, thin-skinned, and sensitive.

He began to crawl.

Once he’d been a football star and soldier and a horseman, proud of his body and what it could do, the punishment it could endure without giving out on him. But now? It wasn’t just that he’d been blown all to shit. It was also that he’d lain there feeling sorry for himself, letting his body weaken.

He still had the will, though. However different he and the old man were, Dale Wilmot had bequeathed him that one thing: will.

I’m not gonna die out here.

He crawled on and on, pushing himself, working through the fire that shot up through what remained of his limbs until they became completely numb.

I’m not gonna die out here.

After several hundred yards, he stopped in the middle of the trail to rest. Although the snow was still coming down, it had slackened a little, falling gently on his face and on his eye and on his outstretched tongue. It was peaceful, and the cold was like a blanket, and he closed his eyes so he could sleep.

29

WASHINGTON / IDAHO

A light dusting of snow covered the ground when the plane landed at Spokane International Airport in Washington State, just over the Idaho border. The airport was barely large enough for four gates, and Nancy Clement suspected its claim of “international” status was an exaggeration. Because of its size, however, she was able to purchase a last-minute ticket that she paid for at Dulles airport with her personal credit card, and to walk directly from landing to the Budget Rent A Car counter. The man at the counter was a morose-looking Indian guy who was missing all his upper teeth, giving his speech a lisping quality.

“Could be a vide out,” he said, nodding his head as though in support of the notion that the worst possibilities are always the ones that actually come to pass.

“A what?”

“Vide. Out.” He saw she was looking at him blankly. “A videout blizzard. So much snow you can’t see your hand in front of your face, so please drive carefully.”

“Thank you. I will.”

He smiled a broad cheerless smile, showing off his gums. “Have a good day.”

With that cheery send-off, she began driving north toward the address she’d found for Dale WilmotR a t="0e17;s estate. The GPS showed the distance as only thirty-five miles, so she hoped she could get there before the roads became impassable.

The first part of the drive along US 90, wasn’t bad. It was snowing hard, but the traffic kept the right lane relatively free of snow. The car felt stable and sure-footed, even at highway speeds. But then she swung off onto a rural route that wound upward into the higher elevations toward Priest Lake, and the conditions quickly deteriorated. Within minutes of turning off the highway, she began to feel a relentless tick of nervousness. Soon she was driving through four or five inches of virgin snow, not a single tire track on the road. She had rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser, but still the car occasionally came unglued as she cornered, and once she even drove off the road far enough to worry about plunging down a hillside.

After that she drove with more caution.

To make matters worse, the map she carried was not very detailed, and the GPS in her car seemed to have no record of the road she was traveling on. She had finally switched it off after the condescending English-accented female voice had said “Turn around as soon as possible” for about the ninetieth time.

The wipers were going full speed, and the heater was blasting, but the windshield was getting clogged with snow. And even in the brief seconds when the wiper blades cleared it, she was unable to see more than a few feet in front of her. She found herself driving five miles an hour, more or less completely blind, up a mountain road. The notion that she might have to pull off the road and sit for a while started to seem entirely plausible, and the possibility made her hungry. She had eaten a nasty little ham and cheese sandwich in Las Vegas before changing planes. But that was six and a half hours ago.

And now the world had turned to an impenetrable gray mass. Finally, she gave in, stopped the car, got out, and stood in the snow. She had never seen anything like it before in her life. Raised in Tennessee, she had never even felt a snowflake on her cheek before she joined the FBI.

She would have thought that a whiteout blizzard would have been pretty and soft and white. But instead it had a grim grainy quality, like the soot from a crematorium.

She could more or less tell where the road was because the dim, black shapes of trees loomed over her, half visible through the snow. She glanced at her watch. A little after four o’clock. The sun would be going down pretty soon, which would only make matters worse. She’d probably be stuck there for the night.

For the first time she began to feel something that edged toward panic, when suddenly, mercifully, the snow let up. Perched on a hillside not more than a mile or two away, she saw a massive post-and-beam lodge, a house so big it almost could have been a hotel.

That was it. It had to be.

Five minutes later she was pulling up in front of the house. She climbed out and knocked on the door. But no one answered. Nancy looked around the house, trying to see inside, but there was no sign of life. Then, in the dimming light, she made out a dark figure trundling up a path, bundled in a heavy coat. It was a woman, a good four inches taller than Nancy, who outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. She wore pale green scrubs beneath a huge parka. Nancy followed her inside. Framed by the furry hood, the woman’s expression was tight with panic. Nancy showed the woman her identification.

“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That Evan is missing.”

“Who’s Evan?”

“Mr. Wilmot’s son. I was just about to call the police.”

“I didn’t come for Evan. I came to talk to John Collier.”

“He’s not here. He’s with Mr. Wilmot. They flew out together earlier today, but I need to find Evan. He’s in a wheelchair, so he can’t have gone far. My God, Mr. Wilmot will kill me.”

“Slow down and tell me what happened so I can help you,” Nancy said, trying to calm the frantic woman.

The nurse explained that she’d been given explicit instructions to keep Evan inside. He was not well, and might try to defy her, but for his own safety and health he needed to avoid the cold outdoors. Now she feared he might be dead from exposure. She was close to a nervous collapse. She had picked up the phone a dozen times to call Mr. Wilmot but had hung up every time.

“I told him not to go outside, but he did it anyway. You have to help me find him.” The woman grabbed Nancy by the collar and yanked her though the doorway. She was immensely strong.

Nancy Clement thought for a moment. If Wilmot and Collier were gone, the son Evan might know something. Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere in this weather.

“Have you got a heavy coat I can borrow?” Nancy asked. “Mine’s kind of thin.”

The nurse had searched for an hour by herself before she had come back and found Nancy at the door. The hapless caregiver had been looking in the wrong place, however. She assumed Evan would try to go down the driveway to the main road, but in fact he had gone off toward the woods.

It was Nancy who suggested they check the logging trail, and they soon found him. He had pulled himself into a ball inside his coat, protecting his head and face from frostbite. He was unconscious. The nurse picked him up and began staggering through the snow back to the house, carrying the young man like a baby.