Hard Target (52 page)

Uzi was silent as the news hit him right between the eyes.

“You hear me? Uzi?”

“Still here. Good work, Tim. No, awesome work. Now check everyone, check all the digital files of everyone in the administration. Secret Service, White House staff, FBI, CIA—”

“Whoa, you know how many people you’re talking about?”

“Write a program to search for specific parameters.”

“I guess I can put something together.”

“Do it. Call me back if you find anything else.”

Uzi ended the call and turned onto H Street while struggling to punch in DeSantos’s phone number. As he pulled in front of a temporary barrier and security checkpoint blocking the street to through traffic, DeSantos answered.

“Santa—I’m two blocks away.” He got out of the car, showed the FBI agents his credentials, and took off in a sprint. “Leila and one of her buddies just killed my shrink. Another goddamn bomb. But he overheard them saying something was gonna happen to Aksel at two o’clock. Get him out of there, Santa, get ’em all out. There’s probably a bomb—”

“Whoa, hold on— Do we know for sure there’s a bomb?”

“I don’t have video of them planting the damn thing, if that’s what you mean,” Uzi said as he ran by three well-dressed businesspeople making their way toward the Hay-Adams.

“You wanna evac the hotel, cause a freakin’ stampede—and panic world leaders, without confirmed intel? Other than an overheard comment, we’ve got zip. NSA, CIA, FBI all say we’re clear. Maybe they’re planning to take a shot at him when he leaves the building. I’ll have SWAT sweep the rooftops again.”

As Uzi neared the hotel, he wondered just how much he could rely on what Rudnick had told him. He’d heard Aksel’s name, saw the device they were wiring to his foot, thought of the recent news reports, and made the assumption they were going to set off a car bomb.

Am I overreacting?

“Uzi, I’m asking you again. Are you absolutely sure there’s a bomb?”

“No.”

“Then get your ass over here and we’ll figure it out. If you press the fucking panic button and you’re wrong, Knox won’t be happy. And Aksel will never let you live it down.”

Uzi, bristling at DeSantos’s last comment—but knowing he was right—rounded the corner. “I’m almost there. Meet me out front.”

As he passed the free-standing brass Hay-Adams sign, he hit a human wall of dark-suited, ear-miked Secret Service agents. But there was no time to stop. He held up his credentials as he barreled past them, yelling, “FBI— Let me through!”

After hearing a shout of “Hey—” and expecting to be tackled from behind, he saw DeSantos a dozen feet ahead, approaching on the run.

“It’s okay, let him go, let him go!” DeSantos pulled Uzi inside. The lobby was crowded with overflow visitors attending the conference. “Let’s talk. I just spoke to Knox.”

1:43 PM

17 minutes remaining

Presidential Suite

Eighth floor

Hay-Adams Hotel

Leila Harel—aka Leila al-Far, aka Batula Hakim—peered out the eighth floor window while a black ski-masked Alpha Zulu finished affixing the flexcuffs to their hostage’s wrists.

“Everything look okay?” he asked.

“All’s good,” Hakim said. A thin smile of smug satisfaction spread her lips. “Secret Service is clueless.” And then she gasped.

“What?”

“Son of a bitch.” Face flushed, she grabbed her assault rifle and started toward the door.

Zulu stood and caught her arm. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Uzi’s downstairs.”

“Impossible. Hassan said the bomb went off.”

“I know what I just saw. He’s in the hotel.” She yanked her arm from his grasp.

“Let it go,” Zulu said. “Let
him
go.” He stole a look at his scorpion-themed watch. “They’re all dead in fifteen minutes anyway.” He drew his handgun and pointed it at their gagged hostage. “We need to set the timer and get out of here.”

“No!” She pushed his arm down and brought the submachine gun up to Zulu’s chest.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I want Uzi.” She nodded at their prisoner. “And he’s my ticket.”

The room phone began ringing as Zulu looked down at the floor, where four bullet-riddled bodies of the foreign dignitary’s security force lay on the carpet in their own pools of blood.

And beside them was the bound and gagged Gideon Aksel.

1:44 PM

16 minutes remaining

Lobby

Hay-Adams Hotel

Uzi stood with DeSantos at the concierge’s desk, shaking his head. “I still think we need to get everyone out of here, regardless of what Knox says. If I’m wrong, it’s on me. But if I’m right, and we don’t do anything, a thousand people are gonna die.”

“It’s out of our hands, boychick. We don’t get paid the big bucks to make the big decisions.”

“Santa, think of the power sitting in that room fifty feet away. The heads of the US, British, and German counterterrorism agencies are in there—not to mention Aksel and fifteen other intelligence chiefs. If I was a terrorist choosing targets, I’d go for the most bang for the buck. Gideon and Earl Tasset. Whitehall would be symbolic, yeah. Morally degrading, embarrassing. But it’s not critical because Rusch and Nunn take over in a matter of weeks.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but—”

“Think of the impact it’d have if they bring this building down with Tasset and Gideon inside. It’s every terrorist group’s wet dream. Their two worst enemies, gone. Regardless of my personal feelings about Gideon, he’s a freakin’ legend—and he’s here,” Uzi said, pointing at the ground.

“Knox says there’s no way they got a bomb into this place. They’ve had scanners set up the past two weeks.”

“This cell has been operating here for how long? Do we know? Sleeper groups have been here fifteen years. Leila’s been here five. You don’t think they could’ve brought the explosives in three weeks ago? A month? Why not six months ago, when the conference was first announced?”

DeSantos sighed, checked his watch, and then rubbed his chin. “So you think Aksel and Tasset are the targets.”

“Knowing what I know now, yeah. One or both. That’s my bet. Them and as many of those counterterrorism officials in there as they can take with them. Think like a terrorist— To blow up a counterterrorism conference, and to do it across the street from the goddamn White House—”

DeSantos brought his sleeve to his mouth and spoke into his mike. “This is Santa. Where are Director Tasset and Director General Aksel? Over.”

DeSantos listened through his earpiece, then looked at Uzi with concern.

“Tasset’s with his detail,” DeSantos said. “But Aksel’s late coming down and he’s not answering his phone. Secret Service just went up to his suite to get him.”

1:46 PM

14 minutes remaining

The Presidential Suite

Hay-Adams Hotel

Batula Hakim crossed the room and stood beside Gideon Aksel’s prone body. “Get him up.”

Alpha Zulu shifted his MP-5K compact submachine gun, then reached down and grabbed Aksel’s arm. “Get up, old man.”

Aksel, bound and gagged, could not respond other than providing resistance as Zulu struggled to pull the man to his knees, much like a tantruming toddler uses gravity in some super-secret high-tech manner to appear heavier than he is.

Frustrated, Zulu pointed the MP-5K at Aksel’s head. “Get up, goddamnit, or I’ll blow you away right now!”

Hakim threw out a protective hand. “No—”

“To hell with your personal vendetta,” Zulu said. “We have a mission to carry out and we’re running out of time.”

Hakim set her jaw and looked hard at him. “We’ve got fourteen minutes. And I deserve every one of them.”

Zulu stared back. But he knew that no amount of reasoning would change her mind.
Damn bitch. If we didn’t need her and her group, we could’ve gotten rid of her a long time ago
. “Fine. But if things go to hell, we take Aksel and leave. Whether or not you get Uzi. Am I clear?” He got a slight nod in response. “But we’re not going anywhere if we can’t get him into the elevator.”

Hakim stepped forward and viciously slammed the stock of her submachine gun into Aksel’s temple. “Get the fuck up!”

Aksel’s neck snapped to the side, and a trickle of blood appeared where the metal had ripped through the skin. He looked up at Hakim with bloodshot gray eyes that seemed to sizzle with anger. But the tough old bird shook off the pain and slowly got to his feet.

Zulu shoved him toward the door and was about to grab the knob when a series of firm knocks froze him in midstride. Zulu shoved the muzzle of his MP-5K into Aksel’s ribs.

“Director General,” called a voice behind the door. “Please open up. Agent Vickers, Secret Service.”

Zulu motioned Batula Hakim to a hidden spot off to his left, then dragged Aksel backwards a few feet to the middle of the room near where his dead bodyguards lay.

Hakim removed a suppressed Walther from the holster on her belt and unlocked the deadbolt.

“It’s open,” Zulu yelled from across the room. “Come in.”

The doorknob turned and two Secret Service agents walked in. In a fraction of a second, their gazes took in the scene—Aksel gagged and bleeding, his hands bound behind him—and four men lying on the floor in pools of blood. The agents reached for their weapons, but it was a fruitless maneuver.

Batula Hakim fired two headshots, and the men fell limp. She reached over, relocked the door, and walked across the room toward the phone.

1:48 PM

12 minutes remaining

Lobby

Hay-Adams Hotel

DeSantos was waiting for Director Knox to respond to his request for a modification of their operational plan when the telephone rang. The concierge looked up and cupped the handset. “Agent Uziel? Is there an Agent Uziel here?”

Uzi and DeSantos shared a perplexed look, then Uzi reached over and took the phone.

“This is Uzi.”

“I take it you know who this is.”

Leila. Batula Hakim. The woman who murdered my family.
“Yeah, I know who it is.” Uzi moved the phone so DeSantos could share the handset.

“I have something you want.”

A few days ago, that statement would have brimmed with raw sexual tension. But now it carried visceral emotion filled with vengeance. “Where and when?”

“In the basement by the kitchen. Come alone or I’ll kill another person you care about.”

The line went dead. Uzi eyed the fire alarm panel across the room, to the left of the main entry doors. It had worked with Rudnick’s building. It’d be a much more orderly way to evacuate the hotel than to announce there were terrorists about to detonate a bomb.

“Where did that call come from?” DeSantos asked.

The concierge looked at his panel. “Presidential Suite, eighth floor.”

DeSantos’s shoulders slumped. “Go to the basement. I’m going up to Aksel’s room.” He brought his secure sleeve mike up to his lips and spoke into it: “Hot Rod, Santa. Come down from the roof, meet Uzi in the basement. Hakim may be en route. Armed and dangerous. Potential hostage situation. Hodges, meet me on floor eight, Presidential Suite. Same parameters. Rest of you, take support positions. Over.”

“Tell Knox and get HRT and SWAT up to speed,” Uzi said as he backed away. He ran to the fire alarm, and pulled the switch. A blaring siren started wailing.

A nearby bellman pointed at Uzi. “Hey! What’re you doing?”

Uzi moved quickly toward him. “What’s the fastest way to the basement?”

The young man with slicked back hair was frozen by Uzi’s urgent tone. “The John Hay room,” he shouted, squinting against the siren’s blare. “Far left wall behind the divider.” He gestured across the lobby.

“Get everyone out,” Uzi said, backing away. “Emergency’s real.”

He ran past the bank of elevators, then turned right down the short wood-paneled corridor and pushed through the etched glass doors. The two hundred foreign dignitaries and press corps packed into the grand dining hall/conference room collided with one another as they rushed for the doors. Four Secret Service agents looked overwhelmed as they attempted to exact an orderly exit.

Uzi pulled the Smith & Wesson from his belt, but kept it beneath the flap of his jacket as he worked his way through the crowd of tables toward the far left wall. After slipping behind the tall folding room divider, he entered the stairwell that led to the basement. With his back to the wall and his weapon now out in front of him, he slowly descended the steps.

The long, white-tiled basement hallway fed into, and dead-ended at, the kitchen. A room service cart stood off to the right, opposite a black elevator door. Uzi craned his neck, trying to see around tall industrial plastic containers and boxes of Evian stacked six rows high.

Close quarters and impaired line of sight. Great.

About the only positive was that the fire alarm was not nearly as loud down here.

He turned right into the main area of the kitchen. Aside from adobe tile flooring, stainless steel dominated the room. Ovens, cook stoves, refrigerators, and deep sinks brimmed with the matte-finish metal. Sizzling steaks sat on the broiler to his left. With the fire alarm ringing, the cooks had shut off the burners and evacuated. Uzi pushed forward into the adjacent room, where a walk-in freezer swallowed the far wall.
Clear.

He lowered his Smith & Wesson and took in the lay of the land: this portion of the basement consisted mostly of the kitchen—which itself was a dead end. Though there was only one way in or out, an elevator and two feeder staircases spilled into the corridor twenty yards away, near where he’d entered.

A rumble in that direction grabbed his attention. Stepping out of the elevator was a ski-masked man with a compact assault rifle, followed by a bloody, handcuffed Gideon Aksel.

And Batula Hakim.

Uzi swung his S&W toward Hakim’s head. Their eyes met and he saw something in them he had never seen before. Deep-seated contempt. His probably said the same.

“Should I call you Leila Harel or Batula Hakim?”

“You’re a fool, not to know the woman who killed your beloved wife and daughter.” She spit the words, her tone full of disdain. “To make love to me, to dishonor your wife like that.”