The Beltway Assassin (12 page)

There were one set of respectable clothes in the bag and a shaving kit. He looked at his watch. There was enough time to clean up and blend in with the oppressors; his success was virtually guaranteed.

****

An hour after Garcia’s death, the Iranian sat in the first-class lounge at Ronald Reagan International Airport, which the more liberal residents of DC still called “National” airport out of petty spite. The TSA’s knee-jerk reaction to the recent bombings was to turn the screening apparatus up to eleven and throw away the knob. The Iranian had skipped security with a wave of his Paraguayan diplomatic passport, courtesy of a well-compensated government employee in Asuncion.

He sipped his Old Fashioned and called Zike from his cell phone. He noticed a drop of blood on his shoe as the phone rang. He wiped his shoe against the carpet and sighed. Killing Garcia had been a rush job. A little more time and planning, and the Iranian could have eliminated that worthless junkie without having to sacrifice his favorite pair of wing tips. The shoe had evidence on it and had to be disposed of.

“What?” Zike said.

“I took care of a loose end,” the Iranian said. “The lesser of the two, unfortunately. So you still have some work to do.”

Zike grunted. “The trap has baited. One problem might take care of another if we’re lucky.” His words sounded muddled to the Iranian, like his jaw was swollen after a visit to the dentist.  “There’s a complication. The DNA tests we suppressed were stolen and smuggled out before we could stop them. The techies swear it’s the Chinese, but it has to be Caliban.”

“And what do
they
know?” the Iranian said.

“Jefferson’s true name. With enough time they’ll track him down. Even if they do get him, the damage he can do is minimal. He doesn’t know the plan or who you are beyond a description and nickname,” Zike said. The Iranian heard a waver in Zike’s voice; he was hiding something. Now, on an open line, wasn’t the time to press the issue.

“They’re capable. Best not to discount them. Should we be concerned? Solve the problem piecemeal instead of all at once?” the Iranian asked.

“They won’t act on a suspicion. Time is on our side,” Zike said.

The PA system in the lounge announced his flight to Phoenix. The Iranian stood and smoothed out his camel-hair overcoat.

“I have a reunion to make. We’ll be in touch once we’re situated.” He ended the call.

The terminal was abuzz in fear. Passengers, even after the near body-cavity search at the first security screening, faced ticket and identity verification at the gate, along with another search with a metal-detecting wand. The Iranian smirked as he passed parents assuring their two children that “the bad bomber man” wasn’t going to blow up their plane.

If these people were afraid now, just wait until what the Iranian had planned came to their doorstep.

Ritter took a cold pack from the medical chest and pressed his fingers into the pouch. He felt the two packets sliding beneath his touch: water and ammonia nitrate pellets. So simple to open the pack and use the ammonia nitrate as the explosive in a bomb. Ritter crushed the pack in his hands and felt the endothermic reaction of water as the two packets’ mixture leached heat from his fingers.

Jefferson, Ritter decided, wasn’t so much a mad genius as a man with a decent appreciation for basic chemistry.

Ritter set the now-eponymous cold pack against his cracked ribs and wrapped an elastic bandage around his torso. Breaking small bones was more of an inconvenience than anything else; there was no treatment but to let them mend on their own accord and not aggravate the injury. At least he wouldn’t have to see a doctor, as he’d had to for the nearly healed bullet wound on his shoulder.

He looked at himself in the floor-length mirror. Bruise mottled skin that hadn’t seen sunlight in months. He looked rundown and felt like whatever key in his back kept him going was on its last rotation. Maybe he and Cindy could get away to Florida for a few weeks when this latest crisis had subsided.

“You look like hell,” Shelton said from behind him.

Ritter shrugged and tossed on a fresh white dress shirt.

“Where were you? We might have arrested whoever Garcia met with if you’d been there with me,” Shelton said. He watched Ritter for the slightest variance in body language. Knowing Ritter for years gave Shelton a good baseline on his tells.

“Irene needed to be picked up. There was some sort of explosives accident at TEDAC, and the building was shut down,” Ritter said. He turned back to the mirror and put on a red silk tie.

“She can’t drive herself?” Shelton asked.

“She was at the embassy in Baghdad in March 2008, when Sadr and his bunch of butt buddies were slamming it with rockets and mortars several times a day. Her trailer went up, along with a roommate. She’s had a touch of PTSD ever since. The unexpected explosion triggered some bad memories…and she needed a ride out.” Ritter’s focus stayed on his tie, which he had to redo while talking.

Shelton couldn’t read him. Subjects normally couldn’t maintain a lie while doing something other than concentrating on their lie, but Ritter was a pro.

Shelton looked at the office chair, which had Ritter’s shoulder holster draped over it. Shelton gave the chair a little push, and it spun around to reveal…a combat knife fastened inside a sheath. The knife was different, with a wooden handle hilt and brass pommel and hand guard. Shelton resisted the urge to challenge Ritter on the new knife, but that might tip his hand.

“Will Irene be okay?” Shelton asked.

Irene popped into the room, holding two pizza boxes in front of her, a smile on her face.

“We got pepperoni for us and onions and pineapple for Tony,” she said. She gave Ritter an even bigger smile. “You hungry, Eric?”

“Sure, we’ll be right there,” Ritter said.

Irene’s gaze lingered on Ritter as she left with a skip.

“She seems devastated,” Shelton said. A few questions to Irene would wreck Ritter’s alibi for Garcia’s murder. But not now. Not on Ritter’s turf. He’d take them apart in detail when the time was right.

“Resilient little thing, isn’t she?” Shelton asked. Maybe there was more there, another chink in Ritter’s armor. “How long have you two been an item?”

Ritter did a double take. Finally, an unforced error.

“What? No, we…”

Shelton watched the lie form in Ritter’s mind. Shelton had seen them together at TEDAC, her hand grasping his rear end. Then the doe eyes from Irene when she stopped by. Why would Ritter deny a connection?

“Just an office fling. Our boss is a ball buster about that sort of thing,” Ritter said. The hint at Ritter’s higher echelon of leadership was thin but might prove useful to Shelton in the future.

“You think you can keep it quiet?” Shelton asked.

“Wouldn’t be very good at my job if I couldn’t.” Ritter looked out the door, obviously anxious to change the topic. “You hungry?”

****

Tony was two slices ahead before Ritter and Shelton joined him and Irene at a folding table. Parmesan cheese and pepper packets were strewn across the table alongside a two-liter bottle of soda. The pizza was bland and as greasy as one Shelton expected from the restaurant next door. Yet hunger proved to be the best sauce.

“Then the guy says, ‘Ass! Freeze holes!’” Shelton said with lisp.

Chuckles erupted from Irene and Tony. Ritter kept his sense of humor in check.

“Then he passed gas and left. Local cops picked him up at a bus station a block away. Worst bank robber ever,” Shelton said.

Irene cracked up and gave Ritter, whom she’d sat next to, a playful jab in the side. Ritter bunched up in pain, and soda spat from his lips.

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry,” Irene said. She rubbed her hand on Ritter’s shoulder to comfort him as he took forced slow and even breaths. He took her hand away and gave it a quick squeeze for Shelton’s benefit. She gave his knee a pat under the table.

This is exactly what I don’t need right now
, Ritter thought. Keeping his office romance with Cindy, a world away on a mission in the Ukraine, a secret was a challenge. Irene must have thought he was available, and rescuing her, as cliché as it sounded, might have raised him a few pegs in her estimation.

Now he was stuck keeping up appearances to appease Shelton’s assumptions.
What a tangled web we weave
, he thought. He could let Irene down easily later.

“Remember when we ate at that little farm in Greece? The best feta I’ve ever had,” Tony said.

“Not as good as the time we went to Noma in Denmark,” Irene added.

Ritter cleared his throat.

“But there was that place in Salzburg where Ritter and—Ow! Who kicked me?” Tony asked.

“Not in front of guests,” Ritter said, glancing at Shelton. “Business trips. No offense.”

“Some taken,” Shelton said.

A series of beeps came from Tony’s computer banks.

Tony dabbed tomato sauce away from his shirt and stood up. “We’ve got a DNA hit,” he said.

Ritter kept eating, uninterested, as if the results were a foregone conclusion.

Tony tapped at his keyboard, and the picture of a soldier in a green Class A uniform came up on a wide-screen TV. The soldier was in his early twenties, fair haired. There were no ribbons on his uniform, but he had the single “mosquito wings” chevron of private rank on the sleeve.

“DNA comes back for an AWOL soldier,” Tony said. “Erasmus Toolidge, twenty-two, enlisted in 2008—scored off the charts on his ASVAB—as an 89D, explosives ordnance disposal. Which explains how he knows so much about bombs. Have to know how to put them together before you can blow them apart. He finished basic training but went AWOL right before he graduated from Explosive Ordnance Disposal school. He was about to be kicked out for ‘failure to adapt,’ but it…seems he developed quite the beef with the war in Iraq toward the end of his training…Also something of a nut, according to a psych eval. He
had
the normal AWOL warrants out on him in the system, but those magically disappeared about six months ago.”

“That’s our Jefferson. He never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan?” Ritter asked.

Tony shook his head.

“Then how does he learn to make bombs just like an Iraqi insurgent?” Ritter asked.

“The Iranian? He had the basic skills from the army; the Iranian taught him the designs. It fits the evidence,” Irene added.

“It does,” Ritter said, “but there are better ways to design bombs than what an Iraqi could cobble together in his garage. This is America. He has access to more sophisticated material and components.”

“To stay off the grid? He has warrants,” Shelton said. “Make the bombs with low-profile components. No one calls the FBI to report a homeless guy paying cash for commercial-grade explosives or two tons of fertilizer.”

“There’s something we’re missing. Why have a former soldier masquerade as an Iraqi bomb maker?” Ritter asked. The room was silent, as no answer surfaced.

“What about the other set of DNA?” Shelton asked.

Tony shook his head. “No hits.”

“Where’d you get his records?” Irene asked.

“The repository. His DNA was scrubbed out of army and law-enforcement databases the same time his warrant went away,” Tony said.

“So when the FBI finishes their tests, they still won’t know who they’re looking for. Only we know who he is, but does that do us any good?” Shelton asked.

“Maybe. The photo is old. Can we get a facial-recognition match?” Ritter asked Tony.

“Short answer no, long answer yes,” Tony said. “When beard and the junkie—”

“Beard?” Shelton asked.

“—were talking,” Tony continued, “the junkie said Jefferson killed a soldier in Baltimore a couple of months ago. I found the case, Sergeant Kyle Morrow, was on terminal leave from the army and using the Pratt Library to meet with a study group for his undergrad degree. He was shot in the back—no suspects and no witnesses. Case is still open, but no one’s working it in Baltimore PD.”

“Why? A veteran is murdered in cold blood, and the police just don’t care?” Irene asked.

“Baltimore has one of the highest murder rates in the country, three times worse than DC, and only a handful of homicide detectives,” Shelton said. “There’s only so much they can do on a case with no leads. I don’t excuse it, but I can understand why they aren’t pursuing the case.”

“Video surveillance?” Ritter asked. “He would have surveilled his target, watched him for a few days to establish a pattern, and known where to hit him where the cameras wouldn’t catch the crime.”

Shelton narrowed his eyes at Ritter.

“That’s what I would have done,” Ritter said with a shrug.

“Deleted months ago,” Tony said.

“Internet records,” Irene said. “If he was hanging out at the library, I bet he was on the Internet.” She walked up to Tony and began a low conversation with him. She gave him a few terse commands before finally saying, “Move!”

Windows displaying IP addresses and website URLs, which were meaningless to Shelton, burst on the big screen. One site he did recognize popped up several times, Reddit, an Internet forum for just about everything imaginable.

“He and Garcia were Occupiers, right?” Irene asked as she kept typing. “They do love their Reddit…Cross-reference posts from the timeframe of the murder to the forum from the library’s IP address and…Bingo! Got a username.”

A Reddit user profile popped up with the name xXJeffersonWOTWUXx. The avatar was a black-gloved fist raised in defiance.

“WOTWU?” Tony asked.

“Workers of the World Unite, a commie slogan,” Shelton said.

“Looking through his posts and…Wow, this guys does
not
like Republicans,” Irene said. “He’s only ever active from public IPs—coffee shop Wi-Fi and libraries. Last time he was active was yesterday…Reading up on the new Beltway bomber discussions,” Irene said.

“If we don’t have a more recent photo or a ping on where he is now, then what good does all this do us?” Ritter said.

Irene was silent for a few seconds; then she smiled. “Good news. There was a murder at the last library he went to. I mean, not
good
news, but…Shut up.” Photo stills of a wild-eyed man holding the broken leg of a table came on the screen, parts of a wanted poster. “The local police are a little more motivated to find him now. Seems he beat a woman to death for refusing to get off her cell phone at the library.”

“Is that photo enough for the facial-recognition database?” Ritter asked.

Irene and Tony colluded for a few minutes. A wire frame went over the photo of Jefferson’s face; white dots popped up all over the face, creating a unique profile. “We’re on it,” Tony said, “but it’ll take a while for a hit. Assuming there is a photo to hit off of.”

“You want to bring me up to speed?” Shelton asked.

“We have a search engine that will scan open-source photos on the Internet, traffic cameras, and federal surveillance footage. If he’s out there, we’ll find him,” Ritter said.

“How is that legal?” Shelton asked. “You’re conducting all these searches without a warrant. Any evidence we find will be crushed by any defense attorney that can spell his own name right. Then there’s the fruit of the poisonous tree and so on.”

“I’ll leave the parallel reconstruction up to you, if it ever comes to that. None of what you see here will ever show up in court—not me, not Tony, not Irene, not the whiz-bang search results we’re waiting on,” Ritter said.

“Then how are we going to get a conviction in a court of law?” Shelton asked. “That’s justice, Eric. That’s what I’m here for.”

Ritter’s laissez-faire attitude to due process was starting to gall Shelton. As an officer in the army, Shelton had sworn to a code of conduct that adhered to laws and honor. He’d kept his silence over Ritter’s war crimes to protect his soldiers and maintain the détente that existed between his company and the local Iraqi fighters. The case with Jefferson was different, and Shelton would be damned if he compromised again.