"That was great," Daniel said, leaning back into the couch, "This turned out to be the perfect night. Surprise take out, good wine, great sex. What's next? A massage for these sore legs?"
"Dream on, lover boy. This girl is done for the evening. I'll let you clean up down here, while I get ready for bed. It's been a long day," she said, getting up.
Daniel didn't budge.
"Long day is right," he whispered.
"Hey, do you have anything in your gym bag that needs washing? I can grab it on the way up," she said, heading toward the kitchen with her plate and wine glass.
Daniel popped up and rushed behind her into the kitchen. "No, I'll take care of it. Some two-week old shorts in there. Not the kind of thing you want to deal with, trust me."
"Thanks for the warning. I'll be upstairs," Jess said.
Daniel walked over to the mudroom and listened for her footsteps on the creaky stairs. Once he heard her start up the stairs, he opened the gym bag and removed the briefcase. He heard the bathroom door shut, and several seconds later, the water started to run. He walked out of the mudroom with the briefcase, and opened the cellar door. He needed to find a secure location to hide the briefcase, until he had the time to properly dispose of its contents.
PAINTED BLACK
May 26, 2005
Chapter Three
Special Agent-in-Charge Ryan Sharpe replaced the handset of his desk phone and lowered his head all the way to the surface of his cluttered desk. He exhaled deeply, running his hands through thick brown hair, and kept his head down for a few moments.
Sharpe turned his head slightly, and glanced out of his window onto 9th Street. The traffic had already thickened, and he saw a long ribbon of light blue over the vast sea of buildings. He wished the chaos in D.C. didn't start so early. He could use just a little more time today to figure out exactly what had destroyed his three-year long investigation. He raised his head off the desk, ending what would likely be his only quiet moment for the next few days, looked at his notes on a yellow legal pad, and shook his head.
Task Force HYDRA was finished. The damage done to his investigation was permanent, and unrecoverable. All eight heads had been cut off at the same time, and he needed to figure out quickly what had happened. He had solid evidence linking all of them to Al Qaeda's financing arm, and their sudden termination sounded an earth-shattering alarm. He didn't have long to come up with answers. The city was springing to life, and it wouldn't be long before someone connected the dots. He heard a knock and barked at the door.
"Yes?"
His immediate assistant, Supervisory Special Agent Frank Mendoza, stepped into the doorway of the office and nodded. "Everyone's ready. Need any coffee?" he said, walking all the way into the office.
"I've already had three cups, and I just got off the phone with Delgado," Sharpe said grimly.
"Shit. How high has the news gone?" Mendoza said wincing, waiting for the answer.
"All the way to the President. Homeland raised the threat level to Orange until we can provide solid evidence that we're not on the brink of another 9/11. Obviously, the Director is hot on this, so I wouldn't expect much breathing room today. We've been given top priority for resources."
He decided against mentioning the Director's immediate concern that Task Force HYDRA had been compromised by a traitor. Sandra Delgado, his immediate superior, had kindly informed him that the Internal Affairs Department would quietly pursue this possibility from the sidelines, for now.
"I think we already commandeered half of the building," said Mendoza.
"Stand by to grab the other half. We'll be in the frying pan until we figure out what happened last night. Let's go."
He stood up from the desk and walked out of the office, pulling the door closed. Mendoza fell in behind him as they approached the door to his task force's operations center. He heard considerable chatter behind the door and paused for a second before opening it. The room fell silent when the door swung open, and Sharpe walked to a desk that had been reconfigured to serve as a makeshift podium. The air quality in the room had deteriorated significantly. Rank and humid, the room reeked of bad coffee and faint cologne. The building's air circulation system was unable to compete with a room stuffed to nearly four times its intended capacity.
He glanced behind him and saw that one of three enormous, side-by-side mounted plasma screen monitors showed a map of the East Coast. He faced the center screen for a moment. The map stretched from South Carolina to Maine, and contained markers that indicated the location of each murder. Charleston, South Carolina; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland; Long Island, New York; Manhattan, New York; Rye, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
"Alright, so what do we have?" he said, and turned back to face nearly sixty agents, hastily assembled hours ago to start unscrambling the mess.
A few minutes after one in the morning, Sharpe had received a call from Operation Support's duty section head with news that one of his red flagged profiles had been murdered. When his cell phone rang again before he had even reached the bathroom, he knew this might be the shittiest day of his career. The second phone call confirmed his suspicions. Two of eight key targets in his ongoing investigation had been murdered within the span of a few hours. He didn't have high hopes for the remaining six, and by the time his car passed through the security station at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, he had received four more ominous calls.
A young special agent stepped forward with a few sheets of paper in his hands.
"Sir, as you can see, we're dealing with what appears to be a coordinated strike on all eight of our key surveillance targets. Most of the murders appear-"
"Rob, are you going to tell me anything I don't already know?" interrupted Sharpe.
The young agent looked to his supervisory agent for support.
"I'm not trying to be an ass here, agent,” Sharpe explained, “I just don't have time for a recap of events. We need to move this investigation forward at a record pace, and I don't need to remind everyone here of the implications surrounding these murders."
"These guys," he continued, pointing behind him at the screen, "were conduits of financing for some nasty, dangerous people. We need to figure out exactly why this coordinated attack occurred. The Director is under increasing pressure from the White House, so you can imagine what it's going to be like for the task force as the day progresses. The primary concern is that we have another 9/11 imminent, and that Al Qaeda is cleaning house and cutting ties. This is our focus. Investigations, where do we stand at the different sites?"
A female agent sitting on the edge of one of the closest desks stood up. Her suit looked crisp and her face appeared unaffected by early wake up. She stood in stark contrast to the several of the agents clustered near her as she spoke
"Sir, Supervisory Special Agent Olson. Agents from the closest field offices were dispatched a few hours ago to each site to assist local law enforcement in their initial assessment of the scene. I've taken reports from each site's lead agent. So far, we don't have any witnesses, and evidence appears scant. I think we'll start piecing this together once the sun is up, and we can take a hard look at each site, start knocking on doors. We'll get this moving fast. I've also requested additional agents from other field offices within each region. I want to establish a second tier of FBI support at each site."