Black Flagged (The Black Flagged Technothriller Series) (5 page)

"You don't like Thai food anymore?" she asked, closing the distance between them.

Daniel took her hand and pulled her in tight, giving her a passionate kiss. Her arms wrapped around him, and she pressed her body against his. They kissed for several moments before Jess untangled herself.

"You…need a shower. How was soccer?" she asked.

"Not bad. We needed this practice badly. We got our asses handed to us last night. Did you eat?" he asked and opened the refrigerator.

"I was waiting for you. It's still bagged up in the fridge," she said.

He saw one large brown take-out bag and reached for it, but his hand swerved toward a corked bottle of white wine in the door.

"How about we both take a shower and bring this bottle along with us?" he asked, pulling the bottle out and shutting the door.

"Sure you're not biting off more than you can chew? Late game last night, extra practice today, late dinner. Can you handle it?" she teased and turned to walk toward the staircase.

"I can handle it," he said.

**

Sitting on the floor in front of the couch, Jess and Daniel finished the last of the Thai dinner and Riesling about an hour later. Two pillar candles burned low on the round coffee table, casting a flickering orange glow over plastic take-out containers and empty plates.

"That was great," Daniel said, leaning back into the couch. "This turned out to be the perfect night. Surprise take out, good wine, great sex. What's next? A massage for these sore legs?"

"Dream on, lover boy. This girl is done for the evening. I'll let you clean up down here while I get ready for bed. It's been a long day," she said, getting up.

Daniel didn't budge. "Long day is right," he whispered.

"Hey, do you have anything in your gym bag that needs washing? I can grab it on the way up," she said, heading toward the kitchen with her plate and wine glass.

Daniel popped up and rushed behind her into the kitchen. "No, I'll take care of it. Some two-week-old shorts in there. Not the kind of thing you want to deal with, trust me."

"Thanks for the warning. I'll be upstairs," Jess said.

Daniel walked over to the mudroom and listened for her footsteps on the creaky stairs. Once he heard her start up the stairs, he opened the gym bag and removed the briefcase. He heard the bathroom door shut, and several seconds later, the water started to run. He walked out of the mudroom with the briefcase and opened the cellar door. He needed to find a secure location to hide the briefcase until he had the time to properly dispose of its contents.

PAINTED BLACK

May 26, 2005

Chapter Three

4:52 a.m.

FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

Special Agent-in-Charge Ryan Sharpe replaced the handset of his desk phone and lowered his head all the way to the surface of his cluttered desk. He exhaled deeply and ran his hands through his thinning brown hair, keeping his head down for a few moments.

Sharpe turned his head slightly and glanced out of his window onto 9th Street. The traffic had already thickened. He saw a long ribbon of light blue over the vast sea of buildings. He wished the chaos in D.C. didn't start so early. He could use just a little more time today to figure out exactly what had destroyed his three-year-long investigation. He raised his head off the desk, ending what would likely be his only quiet moment for the next few days.

A few minutes after one in the morning, Sharpe had received a call from Operation Support's duty section head with news that one of his red-flagged profiles had been murdered. When his cell phone rang again before he had even reached the bathroom, he knew this might be the shittiest day of his career. The second phone call confirmed his suspicions. Two of eight key targets in his ongoing investigation had been murdered within the span of a few hours. He didn't have high hopes for the remaining six, and by the time his car passed through the security station at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, he had received four more ominous calls.

Task Force HYDRA was finished. The damage done to his investigation permanent and unrecoverable.
All eight heads had been cut off at the same time, and he needed to quickly determine what had happened. He had solid evidence linking all of them to Al Qaeda's financing arm, and their sudden termination sounded an earth-shattering alarm. He didn't have long to come up with answers. He heard a knock and barked at the door. His immediate assistant, Supervisory Special Agent Frank Mendoza, stepped into the doorway of the office and nodded.

"Everyone's ready. Need any coffee?" he said, walking all the way into the office.

"I've already had three cups. I just got off the phone with Delgado," Sharpe said grimly.

"Shit. How high has the news gone?" Mendoza said, wincing, waiting for the answer.

"All the way to the president. Homeland raised the threat level to Orange until we can provide solid evidence that we're not on the brink of another 9/11. Obviously, the director is hot on this, so I wouldn't expect much breathing room today. We've been given top priority for resources."

He decided against mentioning the director's immediate concern that Task Force HYDRA had been compromised by a traitor. Sandra Delgado, his immediate superior, had kindly informed him that the Internal Affairs Department would quietly pursue this possibility from the sidelines, for now.

"I think we already commandeered half of the building," Mendoza said.

"Stand by to grab the other half. We'll be in the frying pan until we figure out what happened last night. Let's go."

He stood up from the desk and walked out of the office, pulling the door closed. Mendoza fell in behind him as they approached the door to his task force's operations center. He heard considerable chatter behind the door and paused for a second before opening it. The room fell silent when the door swung open, and Sharpe walked to a desk that had been reconfigured to serve as a makeshift podium. The air quality in the room had deteriorated significantly. Rank and humid, the room reeked of bad coffee and faint cologne. The building's air circulation system was unable to compete with a room stuffed to nearly four times its intended capacity.

He glanced behind him and saw that one of three enormous, side-by-side-mounted plasma-screen monitors showed a map of the East Coast. The map stretched from South Carolina to Maine and contained markers that indicated the location of each murder. Charleston, South Carolina; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland; Long Island, New York; Manhattan, New York; Rye, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Sharpe turned to face nearly sixty agents, hastily assembled hours ago to start unscrambling the mess."All right, so what do we have?"

A young special agent stepped forward with a few sheets of paper in his hands. "Sir, as you can see, we're dealing with what appears to be a coordinated strike on all eight of our key surveillance targets. Most of the murders appear—"

"Rob, are you going to tell me anything I don't already know?" Sharpe interrupted.

The young agent looked to his supervisory agent for support.

"I'm not trying to be an ass here, agent," Sharpe explained.

"I just don't have time for a recap of events. We need to move this investigation forward at a record pace, and I don't need to remind everyone here of the implications surrounding these murders.

"These guys," he continued, pointing behind him at the screen, "were conduits of financing for dangerous people. We need to figure out exactly why this coordinated attack occurred. The director is under increasing pressure from the White House, so you can imagine what it's going to be like for the task force as the day progresses. The primary concern is that we have another 9/11 imminent, and that Al Qaeda is cleaning house and cutting ties. This is our focus. Investigations, where do we stand at the different sites?"

A female agent sitting on the edge of one of the closest desks stood up. Her suit looked crisp, and her face appeared unaffected by the early wake up. She stood in stark contrast to several of the agents clustered near her as she spoke. "Sir, Supervisory Special Agent Olson. Agents from the closest field offices were dispatched a few hours ago to each site to assist local law enforcement in their initial assessment of the scene. I've taken reports from each site's lead agent. So far, we don't have any witnesses, and evidence appears scant. I think we'll start piecing this together once the sun is up, and we can take a hard look at each site. Start knocking on doors. We'll get this moving fast. I've also requested additional agents from other field offices within each region. I want to establish a second tier of FBI support at each site."

"Let's get a third tier in the works. I want to send a headquarters team to each site. Four agents minimum. Let's make sure we have one member from Terror Financing in each group, then a good mix of agents from Investigative and Counterterror. We need our own agents on scene ASAP. We can't afford to miss anything," Sharpe said.

"I'll work with Agent Mendoza to get the teams assigned and out the door with the necessary field support," Olson responded immediately.

"Great. I want those teams on site by mid-morning," he added, and both Mendoza and Olson nodded vigorously.

"Next. Comms. Anything?"

Special Agent Keith Weber walked forward a few steps from a position against the left wall of the room. He flipped open a battered pea-green government-issued logbook, which barely looked more weathered than he did. Sharpe saw that he had a sizable coffee stain on his light blue oxford shirt, which could not be hidden by fully buttoning his rumpled suit jacket. Weber pushed up a pair of wire rim glasses to squint at the logbook through puffy, red eyes.

"I've been on with Fort Meade all night. Nothing unusual prior to the murders. We've been poring over this for hours, and we don't see any chatter or patterns that I would classify as suspicious, or even remotely interesting."

"It didn't go dead before the killings?" Sharpe interrupted.

"Not that we could tell. We traced the patterns back a month, and we're seeing the same level of activity," he said.

"And this morning?"

"We've seen a growing increase in communications, both national and overseas. In my opinion, news of the murders is starting to spread through these networks. We're doing everything we can to scan for more meaningful information or patterns, but so far, we haven't detected any direct previous link between our targeted communications and the coordinated attack. There is clearly a growing response after the event," Weber stated and moved back to the wall.

"I can't stress enough the importance of figuring this out. If Al Qaeda pulled the plug on these guys, we could be looking at an attack on our country or U.S. interests abroad. Until we figure it out, we need to treat this like an imminent threat."

He looked over at Supervisory Special Agent Olson and added, "Get those teams out the door before this investigation is hijacked by National Security. Our liaisons will have the best chance of uncovering something useful."

Sharpe was interrupted by Agent Mendoza, "Sir, I just took a call from the lead agent in Newport. They're pretty sure they just captured the shooter alive. He apparently slipped on some rocks and knocked himself unconscious trying to climb down the seawall behind Umar Salah's mansion. They think he's been lying among the rocks all night. They're moving him to the Newport police station."

"Get back on the phone and tell him that I want the suspect transported to the Boston field office. Just make sure they don't piss off local law enforcement. We'll still need their cooperation on scene at the house. And tell him I want that guy in an armored personnel carrier."

"I'm not sure they'll be able to—"

"I'm just trying to underscore the importance of his safe delivery. Did they say whether the suspect was Arab?" Sharpe interrupted.

"Dark-skinned. That's all I got. I'll get more details," he said and stepped out of the room to make the call.

"Agent Olson, I want you to oversee this personally. Call Gregory Carlisle in Counterterror, and tell him to bring his special interrogation team with you to Boston. He'll know what I'm talking about. I want this guy talking."

"Yes sir," she said and pulled out her cell phone, sitting back down on the desk.

"All right, that's it, let's get the teams organized and out of here. Support, I want full links set up to each site. Mobile links for the teams. Data, voice, video…the works. I want to be able to process everything as quickly as possible," Sharpe yelled, as the room erupted into a chaos of multi-tasking FBI agents.

"You got it, boss," yelled a dark-haired, slender, male agent from the back of the room.

"Agent Weber," he yelled.

Weber barreled through the gaggle of agents breaking for the door. "Sir?"

"How long have you been up?" he asked.

"I never went home yesterday. I took the duty section's first shift last night. I was on my way home when I got recalled at about one forty."

"I wish I could tell you that sleep was in your near future, but it doesn't look that way. First thing I need you to do is prepare a media-withhold request for immediate distribution to local law enforcement. I need this in ten minutes. I want to shut down all publicly available information until we have a handle on what we're dealing with."

"I'll have it for you ASAP," he said and turned to leave.

"And, Keith, the coffee works better when you drink it," Sharpe said, touching the coffee stain on Agent Weber's shirt.

Special Agent Weber smirked and bolted out of the room.

Sharpe turned and approached Heather Olson, who had started to dial her phone to contact Counterterror's duty section-lead.

"Heather, I want you to lean on this guy. Tell Gregory to give me a call immediately. I don't want him to hold back on this one. The stakes are too high. We might have to push the envelope here. I hope that doesn't bother you."