The Beltway Assassin (8 page)

He opened his stride and used the last six inches of real estate to launch himself through the air. A second into his flight, he realized he’d severely misjudged the distance between the buildings. What should have been an easy jump over ten feet looked like a doubtful situation over fifteen feet.

Ritter’s arms pinwheeled as he fell against the far ledge. His upper body smashed against the roof with the crack of broken ribs, and his fingertips scraped against the asphalt rooftop for purchase as gravity’s cruel indifference pulled him away from safety. His legs scraped against the wall, failing to get a foothold. He dug his elbows in and arrested his slide backward, then inched forward with trembling arms.

A bullet ricocheted off the side of the building with a zing as he swung his legs over the side. He rolled away from the edge and out of the line of fire from the shooters on the ground.

His rib cage burned with pain from the cracked ribs; each short and shallow breath was a hot poker against his chest.
It’s only pain
, he told himself. There would be time to deal with the injury after he escaped.

He rolled onto his hands and knees, and looked around. There was a rusted ladder on the south side of the roof leading to a fire escape and a closed-door shack leading to the stairwell. Gunshots—short bursts of SWAT M4 carbines mixed with the peals of AK-47 and shotgun blasts—erupted from the drug house. What little remained of the windows shattered as rounds blasted through them.

He struggled to his feet and stumbled toward the fire escape ladder. The sound of booted feet thumping up the stairwell to the roof halted his escape. There was no way he’d make it to the ground without a few new holes if a SWAT team made it to the roof in the next minute.

He pulled his combat knife from the sheath and ran to the doorway. There was a fifty-fifty chance this would work. His heart skipped a beat when he saw hinges; the door was designed to open out onto the roof, and he had a chance to escape.

Ritter rammed the knife into the door frame a few inches below the hinge. He hammered it home with his fist. An improvised doorjamb in place, he clutched an arm against his broken ribs and ran back to the ladder.

He hated to leave the blade behind; it had been a gift from Carlos and Mike for his first kill and his first mission with the Caliban Program. The words
cry havoc
engraved on the blade were a testament to the team’s ethos and lethal nature. A better lesson from that first mission, one that guided him now, and the unofficial motto of covert operatives everywhere, was
do not get caught
.

Carlos would understand losing the blade to ensure his escape. Mike…not so much.

He got three rungs down when someone slammed into the access door. He heard muffled curses and saw the door rattle from repeated kicks against it. He was halfway down the ladder when he heard a shotgun blast; whoever wanted access to the roof must have decided to blow the door off its hinges.

Ritter glanced down; there was nothing but rock-hard concrete to break his fall. He wrapped his hands on the outside of the ladder, braced his feet against the rails, and slid down. Even with gloves, the friction burned through them and sent pain screaming through his hands. He gripped hard as a second blast came from the roof and slowed his descent.

Slowed, he didn’t stop. The ladder ended six feet from the ground, and Ritter found himself with a sold grip on air as he fell. He brought his feet and knees together out of instinct; the ingrained parachute-landing fall training he’d learned at Fort Benning Airborne School was designed to prevent injury when hitting the ground from height.

The parachute-landing fall that should have gone feet-calf-thigh-hip against the ground went feet-ass-skull as he crashed to the ground. Stars burst in front of his eyes as he used a dumpster to get to his feet.

Get away. Got to get away
. He focused on those thoughts as his body screamed for respite. He stumbled away and peeled his jacket off. An alley ahead of him gave him the option to go right or left. He tossed the jacket to the left and goaded his body to a jog as he went right. His cracked ribs punished him with every breath as he made it out to a street with some traffic. Businesses were shuttered behind graffiti-tagged security shutters, the shootings at the drug house prompting curtailed hours. A small knot of homeless men and woman clutched at each other behind a dumpster for protection from the battle, with nowhere else to go.

Ritter unfastened his pants and stripped them off, revealing his track pants. He put on the paper-thin polyester coat stored in the pants pocket and tossed the pants and his coat to the homeless. He started jogging north, despite the pain in his chest. Only three blocks to the Congress Heights Metro Station.

His put his earpiece, which had been flapping against his chest, back in place and turned it on.

“Shelton? Status,” he said. The chest pain from the host of scrapes he’d picked up grew stronger as his adrenaline waned.

****

“Eric? What the hell happened?” Shelton said.

“Did you get the target? He was heading toward you on a bike,” Ritter said, his voice strained between short breaths.

“No sign of him. Where are you?” Shelton asked. He’d heard the gunshots and yelled at Ritter and Tony for updates as the fighting continued. His soldier instincts were to run toward the danger; his time as an infantry company commander demanded that he get positive control over the conflict and close in on the enemy through fire and maneuver, but he’d been relegated to sitting in the car, helpless and useless.

“By that gas station with the tranny hooker we passed,” Ritter said. “Come get me…I’m hurt.”

Shelton shifted the car into drive and broke into traffic, earning honks and a flurry of colorful metaphors. Fear erupted in his chest like a bucket of cold water thrown against him. Despite his history with Ritter, the man had brought his two kidnapped soldiers back to him, and they were partners in this investigation.

“How bad?” Shelton asked. He cut around a parked delivery truck and gunned the engine. His engine block cleared the side of the delivery truck, and a bike crashed into the right side of his car. The biker careened off his hood and flopped to the ground.

Shelton cursed and slammed on the brakes. His foot hovered over the gas as he looked at the distant gas station, where Ritter waited and the biker writhing on the ground. His one-time friend needed him, and so did the injured biker…wearing a tan coat and a dark-red hoodie.

Shelton got out of the car and rolled the biker onto his back; the bloody mug of Aaron Garcia appeared with a mixture of fear and indignity.

“Hey, man, you got to pay for my bike,” Garcia slurred.

“Aaron Garcia, you’re under arrest.” Shelton rolled Garcia back onto his stomach with no amount of gentleness and slapped cuffs onto his wrists. He pushed Garcia into the backseat of the car amid honks and threats from onlookers.

“You got him?” Ritter asked through the earpiece.

“Jackpot,” Shelton said.

“Get him back to…where we met this morning. I can make my own way back, let me make sure I don’t have a tail,” Ritter said.

“Guys, I’ve got some news,” Tony said. “There was another IED attack near Oakton. Some retired Halliburton executive and his wife are dead. Irene says there’s evidence on the way to TEDAC.”

Shelton looked at Garcia, lying on his backseat, bleeding onto the leather and cloth. What, if anything, did this junkie know?

“Get to work on him,” Ritter said. “If he doesn’t talk by the time I catch up, he’s mine.”

****

The only drug dealer to survive the assault was the Hispanic woman who’d wisely opted out of the gun battle by hiding under a desk. A pair of Zike’s men held her against a wall as Zike paced in front of her.

“You saw him here? Right? Where else would he go?” Zike asked. She hadn’t given him a straight answer since her capture, other than to identify one of the dead as her brother and another as a cousin.

She answered with a particularly Mexican insult, and Zike decided she needed more in the way of persuasion. He nodded to one of his men, and a gloved hand went over her mouth.

Zike slammed a steel-shod boot heel against the drug dealer’s shin. The blow snapped her tibia and canted her entire body as the leg refused to bear weight. She screamed into the glove covering her mouth and tears streamed down her face. A smirk went across Zike’s face as the drug dealer’s bravado transformed into begging after just the right amount of pain. 

“Now, where did he go?” Zike asked. His man loosened the grip on her mouth.

She responded with rapid-fire Spanish between sobs.

“English. Why is that so hard?” Zike nodded to his man, and the glove went back over her mouth. Her pleading almost made this trip worth the trouble.

“If you spoke Spanish, you’d know she saw him go up the stairs, and that was it,” the Iranian said from behind him. The Iranian, in a DC police officer’s uniform, had a combat knife in his hand. He flipped the grip on the weapon several times, admiring the perfect balance within the blade.

The drug dealer’s cries worsened.

“Where’d you get that?” Zike asked.

“On the other roof, where we lost our prey.” The Iranian tilted the blade in the light, reading the inscription. “A masterwork, truly.”

“So she doesn’t know where Garcia went?” Zike asked. The Iranian shook his head.

Zike shot the drug dealer twice in the chest and stormed out of the building.

The Iranian ran his index finger along the hilt, testing it for the balance point. He’d seen a blade like this once before. A silent man who moved like a viper had nearly killed him with this blade’s twin in the Houthi lands of northern Yemen. The scar running across his forearm was testimony to the fight, which the Iranian had survived by running into the empty desert after knocking his attacker down a flight of stairs.

It was rare that the Iranian met his match in the shadow games he played for Tehran. He’d never learned who the silent man, or the cohort of equally deadly men who’d attacked his weapons depot, worked for. He’d narrowed the possibilities down to Saudis, British SAS, or the CIA. They were the only ones in the world with the resources and intelligence to come after him so deep in friendly territory.

If the silent man was here…An idea came to the Iranian. One to let the silent man know he was playing a dangerous game.

Irene stirred powdered creamer into her oily coffee and sneered. This was what passed for caffeine in the FBI? Before being recruited into the Caliban Program, her time at the CIA’s cubical farm at Langley had come with a perk of fresh-brewed and moderately palatable coffee—not to mention access to a hot dog vending machine. How anyone could sustain brain function on the slop in her hand was a mystery to Irene.

She glanced at a clock as she went back to her workstation. There was another hour yet before the next brainstorming session on the design of the IED that had blown up McBride on the Beltway. The TEDAC bigwigs had sliced her and a dozen analysts off from the main brain trust to focus on the McBride killing once word of the explosion on the Beltway had reached the FBI. Irene hadn’t complained; it wasn’t like the results of the other investigation were hidden from her.

“What do those grey beards think they’re doing? This is complete crap,” a skinny man in plaid pants and white lab coat said. He gave Irene a once-over as he walked past her.

“How do they expect us to get anywhere if they cut us off from test results?” a second man asked. He had a bald pate and a belly that bespoke of too much time in a chair and easy access to doughnuts. Irene recognized them both from the bombings team and stopped to admire the motivational poster on the wall.

“I mean, if they got the results, give them to us, and we can start building out the guy’s network,” the skinny guy said. He lifted the coffeepot to his nose and smiled.

Irene sipped her lousy coffee and went back to her cubicle. She opened her computer and stuck a tiny thumb drive into a USB port. Her screen flickered, and a plan-text file opened of its own accord. Irene tapped out what she’d overheard and waited. Everything she typed would go straight to Tony through enough encrypted routers and dummy servers the NSA would take weeks to unravel.

A few seconds later, the words “I’m on it” along with a host of smiley faces appeared in the text file. So long as Irene kept the thumb drive in place, Tony had full run of the FBI’s system. Whatever Tony found would go on the thumb drive. He could send text and search commands through his link, but he couldn’t pull out a large file from the system without setting off every alarm the FBI’s IT department had installed.

“Wut R U whering???” popped on the text file. Irene rolled her eyes and minimized the file before someone else saw it, or before she decided Tony needed a good talking to from Carlos once that very large and protective man returned from Europe.

Irene opened up a program for mapping criminal and terrorist networks and pretended to work.

****

Garcia shivered in his seat, one hand cuffed to a ring on a table bolted to the floor. The shakes were part of withdrawal, not from the ambient air temperature. The cop had taken his shoes, his coat, and the three dime bags of meth he’d had in his pocket. The Iranian made sure his old record was expunged, but after his last arrest, it was clear to Garcia that the Iranian’s protection was long gone.

It was his own fault for quitting. The Iranian had left the door open for him, but if the terms were the same, then Garcia preferred a life on the street with occasional stints in jail.

His body quaked with shivers. The feel of spiders crawling under his skin returned, tiny pinpricks slowly migrating up and down his arms. He scratched at them, agitating the sores and scabs around his injection site. The veins in his elbows were nearly collapsed; he’d started using the veins on his forearms to inject. Next would be between the fingers…then the toes.

Maybe that cop would let him snort his meth if he was cooperative.
Can’t hurt to ask
, he thought.

The door to the interrogation room opened, and the big cop who’d arrested him came in with two cups of coffee. Garcia took the drink and choked it down; his meth-parched mouth needed the moisture, and his nervous system needed the boost.

“So you drink it black,” Shelton said.

“Beggars ain’t choosers, you know,” Garcia said. He looked at Shelton with pathetic eyes, determined to play the poor junkie roll in this interrogation.

Shelton sat down and remained silent. Garcia shifted in his seat, scratching against the phantom spiders.

“You know why you’re here?” Shelton asked.

“This ’cause I slipped my tracker? I can explain. My old lady, she—”

Shelton tossed a baggie onto the table, a pair of bullet casings. They weren’t the same casings from the Ashburn crime scene. Shelton had pried the bullet tips from two similar-caliber rounds and dumped the gunpowder. Not that he was going to tell the suspect that.

Garcia looked at the brass casings, his lips working over his fragmented teeth.

“We can place you at the scene of a murder in Ashburn. How bad this goes is up to you,” Shelton said.

Garcia started rocking back and forth, his gaze frozen on the casings.

“Possession, parole violations…couple years. Murder one is punishable by death in Virginia. Your veins are so bad that you’ll probably get the chair instead of lethal injection,” Shelton said.

“It wasn’t me!” Garcia shouted. “I-I-I touched the bullets, sure, when we went to the range, but that was months ago. I didn’t kill anyone. I can’t—that’s why the Iranian kicked me out of the cell.”

Shelton moved his chair closer to the table and nodded.

“It must have been Jefferson. He was all about killing the pigs—I, no offense—the one percenters and…guy’s got a list! A damn list of everyone he’s going to kill.” Garcia smacked dry lips.

“Start at the beginning,” Shelton said.

“It was,” Garcia’s eyes darted back and forth, “summer, June, yeah. I’m at an Occupy rally in Baltimore, and this guy, Jefferson—he’s giving this speech about how we need to ignite the revolution, and he wants fighters. I’d been clean for a couple weeks and needed something to concentrate on, get my mind off the cravings. So I go and volunteer. Jefferson takes a couple days to check me out, make sure I’m not a pig or—sorry—something.

“Jefferson and me, we move into an apartment off of U Street, and this guy shows up every morning to teach us stuff.”

“Who’s this guy?” Shelton asked.

“Jefferson called him ‘the Iranian,’ but he was a blond white guy. Weird, right? I guess it was some sort of code name. We never called him anything else. So the Iranian teaches us all about bombs, how to make ’em from simple stuff like bleach and nail polish remover. How to get the ammonia nitrate pellets from cold packs, mix it with stuff to make a bomb. Real simple stuff, right? He teaches us how to make the bomb. Then we go out to some middle-of-nowhere hick town in West Virginia and shoot the bombs. Shit blows up like those videos the freedom fighters used in Iraq. You seen those?”

“I’ve been in a few,” Shelton said.

Garcia stopped talking, and Shelton saw the wheels turning in his head.

“So you’re a soldier, right?” Garcia said. “Fuck that war, but you guys didn’t have a say in going over and getting blown up. Stop-loss and all that bullshit. So one day the Iranian says we’ve got to prove our commitment to the cause and kill a soldier.”

Garcia lowered his chin to his chest. “I thought I could kill some guy, but I can’t. I had the guy in front of me, but…I couldn’t. Guess I’m a coward.”

“You’re human. We aren’t meant to kill each other, that’s why soldiers go through so much training. Same thing the Iranian was doing to you.” Shelton said. “What was this cause?”

“Jefferson was always going on about some secret group running the government, how they started the Iraq War, use fluoride in the water to make us sick, the Fed stealing our gold to send it to England. Stuff like that. I was onboard with what the fat cats were doing to destroy our country—the rest, not so much.

“After I balked on killing some guy, Jefferson lost his goddamned mind even more than usual and kicked me out,” Garcia said. “He said if I couldn’t kill an oppressor than there was no way I’d kill myself if the cause demanded it. Went on and on about a death pact he said I was too weak to join.” His boney shoulders shrugged. “I bailed on him and the Iranian said I could come back if I found my balls. I started using again…and kind of lost interest.”

“Tell me about Jefferson,” Shelton said. “What’s his full name?”

“That’s the only thing I ever called him. Guy was all about living off the grid, not giving anyone the chance to track him down. He paid cash for everything. I don’t think he ever slept in the same spot more than two nights in a row. Dude’s really nuts. Anger issues. I tried to get him on some sertraline or citalopram, but he’d go on about how the drug companies just want us on their shit to bleed us dry.”

“You know your drugs,” Shelton said.

Garcia smiled, sharing a glimpse of blackened stumps of teeth and a whiff of halitosis.

“They say cocaine is a hell of a drug, but meth is a motherfucker.” Garcia worked his lips over desiccated gums. “I heard about the bombing in Ashburn, figured it was him. I didn’t go to the cops because it was some one percenter getting what he deserved. Then some men in black types come looking for me, and I sort of panicked.”

Garcia looked at Shelton’s coffee with longing. Shelton pushed it to him.

“Who else is on Jefferson’s list?” Shelton asked.

“I never saw it. He said the Iranian gave it to him and that we needed more revolutionaries to hit them all at once, but he said he was adding names of the guilty to it as he did more research.”

“Did Jefferson kill a soldier like the Iranian wanted?”

“Yeah, the day before I pussed out. Shot a guy in the back in Baltimore. No sweat, no regrets.” Garcia downed the coffee, heedless of the burns. “I think the Iranian is trying to help me. He sent a guy to that drug house right before the cops raided the place.”

“That guy the Iranian sent—tell me more about him,” Shelton said.

****

Tony took his piping-hot sandwich pockets from the microwave and blew at his fingers as scalding cheese bubbled from his lunch. Despite working for an organization with a seemingly inexhaustible budget, Tony kept the fridge stocked with such crap food that even a poor college student would think twice about eating.

He plopped into his swivel chair and checked on his scan of the FBI’s system at TEDAC. The suite of viruses, root kits and faux administrator accounts he’d installed weren’t the best he could come up with, but it got the job done with enough plausible deniability to keep their operation clean.

“Hello. What have we here?” Tony said. His program had moved a bevy of DNA reports to the micro USB in Irene’s computer. He couldn’t read the report, just the titles. He took a bite from his pocket sandwich, smearing cheese and processed chicken on his beard.

The door to his office beeped, and Ritter entered, his tracksuit stained in mud. Ritter had that faraway look in his eyes he and Carlos always had after a hard mission. Tony, as a support officer, never got his hands dirty the way Ritter and Carlos did. Each had his own way to come down from a mission filled with adrenaline and death. Ritter preferred to minimize small talk and clean his gear. Carlos went to the weight pile to lift.

As for Mike, if what he did in the field ever bothered him, he never showed any sign of it.

Ritter rummaged through a medical locker and pulled out a bottle of pills. He popped three in his mouth and chewed, washing them down with water from some distant tropical island they kept in the fridge.

“How’d you get back? All the transit lines are shut down,” Tony said.

“I stole a car. It’s a block away on Bacon Street. Wipe it down and have it towed for illegal parking. Where are we on Garcia?” Ritter went to the bank of monitors showing Shelton’s interrogation of their detainee. Ritter’s brows furrowed. He turned up the volume, which had been muted, and gave Tony a sideways glance.

“What? When you guys interrogate some guy, it isn’t a real pleasant experience for me to watch or listen to,” Tony said.

“Shelton is FBI. He’s got his hands in kid gloves when it comes to interrogating people,” Ritter said. When the detainee had valuable information that could save lives and when less obtrusive means had yielded nothing, the Caliban Program wasn’t above using other interrogation means, enhanced or otherwise.

“Still, if I want to listen to some tweaker ramble about—” The border around Tony’s screen flashed red, and a siren sound came from the headphones on his desk. “That’s not good.” His fingers clattered against the keyboard as the red border pulsated.

“Not good…bad. Very bad,” Tony said.

“What’s going on?” Ritter asked.

“My remote-access root kit hash got sniffed—”

“English!”

“The FBI found my bugs. They know we were in the system but…” New program windows burst onto Tony’s screen. “Suck my logic bomb, assholes.” Tony hit
enter
and pushed himself away from his table.

“We’re still clear here.” Tony’s chubby face drooped as realization came to him. “But Irene isn’t. She’s got the drive with the files we stole. When they figure out which computer the files went to…”

“How long will that take? And I thought you said it was impossible for the FBI to detect us in their system,” Ritter said. He opened a storage cage and grabbed a suit off the rack. He started changing clothes.