Under Siege (57 page)

Nervous feet. What a silly thing to say. The assassin didn’t nervous feet.

“Captain Grafton?” A uniformed patrolman asked the question.

“Yes.”

“There’s an FBI agent at police headquarters asking for you, sir. They want you to go down there, if you can.”

“Sure. Tell them I’m on my way.”

‘Okay.”

Jake looked around. Yandke was talking to Rita. He would know where police headquarters were. Jake had no idea.

It wasn’t a real forest, of course. Here on the side of the ndge in Rock Creek Park where Henry Charon stood the tmffic noise was loud. Too loud. It would drown out the noises he needed to hear if anyone came along. Not that that was very likely on a wintees night like this. Rain, cold, wind. Perfect.

He continued slowly up the ridge, making no noise at all as he moved across the wet ground without a flashlight. On his back was a pack that contained his supplies. A sleeping bag on a string hung from one shoulder.

His weapons were in a long gym bag he carried in his right hand. Three grenades, a disassembled rifle, and plenty of ammunition. Under his coat he carried a pistol. The silencer was in his pocket.

He found the little notch in the rocks without difficulty. His woods sense led him unerringly to it. He felt around carefully. Good! The cache in the crack above his head was undisturbed. He lowered the bags to the ground and slipped away from the cave. He circled it in the darkness, taking his time, pausing often to listen and look. In ten minutes he returned to the cave and began unpacking.

He fixed a can of hot stew on a Stemo burner, taking care that the light of the small flame was not visible from the slope below. When he had finished eating and had cleaned up, he got the radio down from the crack where he had

cached it and inserted the earpiece. Then he pulled out the antenna and settled down crossbledencegged in the dry, sheltered area at the rear of the cave to listen.

First the television audio. Since they were covering the crisis on a continuous basis, the networks had a habit of summarizing the news every half hour. He didn’t have long to wait.

The chaos on New Hampshire Avenue exceeded his expectations. No fingerprints, no evidence for the police to sift from the apartment. Henry Charon smiled. He didn’t smile often and never for someone else’s benefit. His smiles were strictly for himself.

The military curfew was news to him and he listened carefully, thoughtfully, trying to calculate what it all meant.

Obviously the troops were looking primarily for terrorists, armed Colombians. If they discovered him it would be solely by accident.

When he had schemed and laid his plans he had never considered the possibility of troops. But he knew there would be unexpected complications so he was not unduly worried. As he sat there in the darkness thinking about it, it seemed to him that the thing to do was to stay holed up until the troops found the terrorists and life on the streets returned to normal. Then once again he could melt into the crowds.

The fact that his picture had been widely disseminated didn’t concern him. He had spent too many years as an anonymous face. He had dealt at the same gas station in New Mexico for five years before the owner began to recognize and greet him. And in a city the size of Washington the inhabitants studiously ignore the faces they see, avoiding eye contact. This was no small town. Human nature would protect him.

He tuned the radio to another frequency band, the police band, and experimented until he heard the dispatcher. He would listen for an hour. That would give him a feel for what was happening in the city.

Of course, he could walk out of the District tonight and

a car in the suburbs and be on his way back to New ico when the sun rose, but no. There were two names on that list Tasson had given him-General Hayden Land and William C. Dorfman. Which should he try first?

Or should he forget about those two and make another try at Bush? About the only way to get Bush now would be to blow up the whole hospital. That would be a project! Impractical to hope one man could successfully accomplish such a project on short notice of course, but interesting to think about. This was getting to be fun.

And once again Henry Charon, the assassin, smiled to himself

“All calls to nine-one-one are recorded,” Special Agent Hooper explained. “I thought someone from the military might want to listen to this, just for the record, since you guys are sort of in charge right now.”

“I like your delicate phrasing-‘sort of in charge-was” “Anyway, I called over to the Pentagon and they suggested you. The people at Guard headquarters said you would be wherever something was happening.”

Jake let that one go by. “Anyway, we’ll have this tape analyzed by a computer for background noise, voice prints, all of it. We’ll eventually get everything there is to get. But I thought you might like to give it a listen.”

“Where?”

“Up here.” Hooper led the way up a set of stairs. Toad, Rita, and Yocke trailed along behind Jake.

“There’s a woman being murdered in an apartment house on New Hampshire Avenue. I can bear the screams. Nineteen-fourteen New Hampshire Better hurry Hooper played the tape three times. “Hes talking too fast.”

“He doesn’t want to stay on the line very long.”

“He’s from the Midwest.” ‘He’s white.”

“He sure as hell isn’t Colombian.”

“Captain,” said Tom Hooper, looking at Grafton. He had sat silently while Toad and Yocke hashed it over.

Jake Grafton shrugged. “He could have edited that down if he had wanted. Even talking fast, he stayed on the line longer than necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

“He could have said as little as this: ‘ationineteen-fourteen New Hampshire. I can bear the screams.

“So?”

“S. You asked what I think. That’s what I think.”

“Maybe he’s smart,” Jack Yocke said. “Would the dispatcher have sent two officers over Code Red if all she had had was an address and reported screams?”

Hooper thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ll ask. Maybe wt.”

“So it’s hurried and wordy and breathless. Unrehearsed, if you will. And it gets immediate action.”

“It did,” Hooper acknowledged. “Officers were there in three minutes. The bomb exploded thirty seconds later.”

“Lot of fire,” Rita Moravia commented. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”

“Probably gasoline,” Hooper told her. Jake Grafton checked his watch. He needed to get back to the National Guard Armory and talk to General Greer. And call General Land.

“You going to be in your office in the morning?” he asked Hooper.

“Yes.

“Could you give me a rundown on what you have on the assassin at that time?”

“Sure. But it isn’t much…. About ten?”

“Ten it is,” Jake Grafton said and turned his gaze to his entourage. “Well, children, the night is young. Let’s get busy.

Henry Charon’s sedan exploded right on schedule, just as Jake Grafton was leaving police headquarters. The glass in the huge windows of the nearby grocery store disintegrated

i-ained down on the unusually large crowd, people there stock up on food for the next few days. Six people were ured, three critically. Miraculously, no one was near the sedan when it blew, but four parked cars were destroyed by the blast and the intense heat. The fire in the parking lot was burning so fiercely by the time the fire department arrived that the asphalt was also ablaze.

The assassin heard the calls on the police radio frequency. Satisfied, he turned the radio off and re laced it in the dry p niche in the rock above his head, then slipped from the cave for another scout around. All he could bear were the sounds of vehicles passing below, and they were becoming infrequent.

The wind was cold, the rain still coming down.

As he undressed and crawled into his sleeping bag he reviewed the events of the last few days. Lying there in the darkness pleasantly tired, feeling. the warmth of the bag, Henry Charon sighed contentedly and drifted off to sleep.

When Jake Grafton arrived at the National Guard Armory, over a dozen young men and three women were being led into the building in handcuffs. The troops escorting them pushed them roughly along with their rifle butts. One woman who refused to walk was being carried.

“Uh-oh,” Jake commuttered as Jack Yocke pulled into a parking place in the lot reserved for government vehicles. As he got out of the car he could hear them cursing, loudly and vehemently. One woman was screaming at the top of her lungs.

The screams followed him down the hall as he headed for General Greers office.

The soldiers searching the Jefferson projects had run into problems, the general said. People refused to open doors, some had illegal drugs in plain sight, and some verbally and physically attacked the soldiers. The officer in charge, Captain Joe White-Feather, had arrested sixteen of the most vociferous and truculent. He also had, the general said, another eight men on a truck coming in. Some residents of the projects had sworn that these men were drug dealers, and indeed, several pounds of drugs and a quantity of weapons had been recovered by the soldiers.

“We can’t not arrest them,” the general said, and Jake Grafton glumly nodded his concurrence. In some complex, convoluted way, this whole mess was about illegal drugs and the people who sold and bought them. The soldiers were going to have to address the problem of the sellers and the users whether they or their superiors wanted to or not. Captain Jake Grafton, naval officer, instinctively recoiled from the implications of the solution. Here was a lawenforcement function pure and simple, yet as the representatives of the government on the spot, the soldiers had to do something. But what? A problem needing a surgeon’s scalpel was going to be addressed with the proverbial blunt instrument, the U.s. Army. Jake Grafton reached for the phone.

Amazingly enough, no one on the Joint Staff had considered this possible complication. Career officers to a man, they had approached the problem from a purely military standpoint. The time crunch had demanded that logistics and the command, control, and communications functions C3-25 addressed first. That was about as far as anyone had gotten. Yet the problem was reality now.

He got home that night at three a.m. Callie was waiting for him when he came through the door.

Amy asleepp”

“For hours.”

“Got any coffee?”

She nodded and led the way to the kitchen. When both of them had a cup in front of. them and were seated at the kitchen table, she asked, “How is it going.?”

He rubbed his face. “We’re locking up everyone who resists military authority and everyone in possession of drugs. Holding them down at the armory. The jails are full.”

“You’re exhausted, Jake.”

“Without a doubt, this is one of the worst days of my life. God, what a mess! We’re all in over our heads-General Land, General Greer, me, every soldier on the street.”

“Did you have any dinner?”

“Wasn’t hungry.”

She headed for the refrigerator.

“Please, Callie, I don’t want anything. I’m too tired. I’m going to take a shower and fall into the rack.”

“We saw you and Toad on television. Outside L’Enfant Plaza.”

“An atrocity, like something the Nazis did to the Jews. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Evil. You could feel it. Wanton murder on a grand scale.”

She came over and put her arms around his shoulders. “What kind of people would do that to other people?” she murmured.

Jake Grafton just shook his head and drank the last of his coffee.

The next morning he stopped by the armory before he went to the FBI building. The rain had slackened and become a mist, under a low ceiling. The streets and wide boulevards looked obscenely empty. Jake passed an occasional military vehicle, some government cars, and the usual police, but nothing else.

All the stoplights were working. He stopped at one, but his was the only car in all four directions. He looked, then went on through.

He was stopped at a roadblock on Constitution Avenue. A soldier standing forward of the door on the passenger’s side

of the car held an M-1 6 on him while a sergeant checked his

ID card.

The sergeant saluted. “You can go on now, sir.”

“Let me give you a word of advice, Sergeant. The people we’re after will start shooting at the drop of a that. I suggest you get a couple more riflemen to cover each car as you approach it. And you might park a couple of your trucks sidewayand in the street here so they can’t go barreling through without stopping.”

“Yessir. I’ll talk to my lieutenant.”

Ninety-one people were now being detained at the armory. They were being held in unused offices and in the corridors and along the sides of the giant squad bay. The soldiers had been busy. They had obtained chain and padlocks from a hardware store somewhere and were securing tilde belligerent people to radiators and exposed pipes and anything else they could find that looked solid.

ome of the new arrivals cursed and screamed and shouted dire threats, but the ones who had been there a while tried to sleep or sobbed silently. Some of them lay in their own vomit. “Withdrawal,” one officer told Jake as he walked by trying not to breathe the fetid stench. The soldiers had a couple of military doctors and corpsmen attending these people. Pairs of soldiers took prisoners to the heads one at a time.

Forty or fifty of the prisoners appeared to be just people who had ignored the order to keep their vehicles off the street. These people were sober and well dressed and were busy complaining loudly to an officer who was interviewing them one by one, checking addresses and driver’s licenses and writing all the information down, then turning them loose to walk home. The cars stayed in the armory lot.

Jake paused and listened to one of the interviews. The man was doing his best to browbeat the officer, a major. Jake signaled to the major, who left his interviewee in midtirade and stepped into the hall. “What are you doing with jerks like that?”

“Holding the worst ones,” the major said, smiling. He