Gideon's War/Hard Target (40 page)

“We need to set up a delivery time and place for those items we talked about,” said his brother. That was their cover. Gideon was Tillman’s arms dealer.

From the way Tillman spoke it was clear to Gideon that Verhoven was in the room with him and might even be listening in on their conversation. “Where and when?” Gideon asked.

“There’s a park on Sully Road in Centerville, just off twenty-eight. Be there in two hours.”

“I’ll need at least four to get together the whole package.”

“Fine. Four hours then.”

“But there’s some options you need to specify on your shopping list.”

He understood this was Gideon’s cue for Tillman to communicate whatever he could about what he’d learned so far.

“Those last breaching charges you sold me were dog shit. I need the good stuff. Skip the Charlies, the Oscars, both of the things from Latvia, and none of that Irish stuff. I’d prefer the Eagles, but the Richards would also be okay.”

“No to Charlie, Oscar, double Latvia or Ireland, yes to the Eagles and Richards.”

“Write it down, man. I can’t afford to have a problem.”

Charlie, Oscar—that was radio letter code. He was pretty sure that’s what Tillman was getting at. He wrote down the letters. C. O. L. L. I. E. R. Tillman continued: “While I’ve got you, I don’t want you using that supplier you asked me about.” He hoped Gideon would understand he was talking about Mixon. “It’s a dead issue.”

There was a brief pause. “Understood.”

“Four hours.”

“One last thing. I have an inside source says the Feds are upping their scanning game. You need to burn this phone and move on.”

“Copy that. Thanks for the heads-up.” Tillman hung up. He’d wanted to tell Gideon that he’d discovered the target was the State of the Union address, but that would have to wait for their face-to-face meeting four hours from now.

Gideon switched back to Nancy. “That was Tillman. Verhoven was listening, so he couldn’t say anything directly, but he managed to tell me that Mixon is dead. And that the guy Mixon recorded talking to Verhoven: His name is Collier. Can you trace that?”

Nancy sighed. “Dahlgren grilled the hell out of me half an hour ago, and he’s trying to get me to tell him where you are. I convinced him that I didn’t know. And that’s when he suspended me. He’s in damage control mode right now. He won’t listen to reason, he won’t listen to me, and he especially won’t listen to you. If he brings you in, it’s just going to be so he can pin this whole disaster in West Virginia on you.”

Gideon felt a rush of anger toward Dahlgren. Nancy had just been trying to do her job, and now she was being punished for it by a bureaucrat who was more concerned with Mix
qned with covering his own ass than with protecting the public. Worse still, Nancy was his only ally inside the Bureau, whose resources he needed.

“Do you have any way to check out Collier? If we get some solid proof, Dahlgren won’t have a choice except to listen.”

He could hear Nancy breathing on the other end. He knew he was asking a lot of her, but without her help he would be operating blindly. Finally, after what seemed like minutes, she said softly, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Then the phone clicked dead.

Gideon was coming up on a rest stop, the welcome station for the state of Virginia. He pulled in, set his phone in a rack full of brochures detailing the state’s many fine tourist destinations, and decided to forgo the cup of coffee he desperately needed so he could distance himself as quickly as possible from the traceable burner.

Nancy got off the phone and put her face in her hands. She was sitting at her desk on K Street, staring out the window. She knew Gideon was right. Dahlgren wouldn’t listen to reason, and without more evidence, they’d never be able to convince him. But what could she do? She’d been suspended. Someone from OPR was supposed to come in about five minutes and take her gun and her credentials.

She sighed and looked at her watch.

Dahlgren may have given the order for her suspension. But that didn’t mean the word had reached the IT department yet. She logged into her account and started typing furiously.

It only took a moment for the computer to find a correlation between the names Collier and Verhoven.

Collier, John C. SS# 000-41-3797. DOB 4/16/85. Born Pocatello, Idaho.

She pulled his credit bureau report and found that his second most recent address was listed in Anderson, West Virginia. Six months ago, though, he had moved to an address in Idaho.

She pulled up the address, found it registered to Wilco Partners, LLC. A few more minutes of data drilling revealed that Wilco Partners consisted of only one partner, a man by the name of Dale Wilmot. A quick scan of Google revealed that Forbes magazine named him the 957th richest man in America, with business interests primarily in timber, but also in heating, air-conditioning, and trucking.

He was a big handsome guy in his late fifties who looked like the older brother of the star in a cowboy movie.

According to an article in Forbes, Wilmot’s only son had been grievously injured in Iraq nearly two years ago, after which Wilmot had ceded daily operations of his companies to senior company management and, in the words of the article, “retreated to his majestic Idaho estate where he has devoted himself largely to philanthropic enterprises and to caring for his son.”

The address of Wilmot’s estate was unlisted, but Nancy managed to track it down through a federal tax assessment dated a year ago. But as the address came on screen, two tall men in dark suits walked into her office. “Special Agent Clement,” one of them said, “I would request that you surrender your duty weapon and credentials, and then accompany me to—”

“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.