“It would make you Fibbies look awfully good.”
“And Knox,” Uzi said. “Let’s not forget politics. Frazier and Ali. Budgets and shark blubber.”
“Tyson and Holyfield, not Frazier—” DeSantos eyed him over the tops of his glasses. “You making fun of me?”
“Whatever the reason,” Uzi said, “it gives us less time. Conference starts at two.” He swiped his finger across the screen, then slid the phone back into his pocket. He walked in a circle, pacing, lost in thought.
“What’s with the pacing? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we don’t have a whole lot of time to solve this thing.” He stopped and stroked the stubble on his cheek. “Okay. We attack it on a few fronts. First we pay a visit to Quantico and interview the flight crew and maintenance personnel who worked on the choppers, then get with CIA and NSA to see if they picked up any chatter they didn’t process fast enough.”
DeSantos was nodding at each of Uzi’s suggestions, then added, “We also need to look into the backgrounds of the other people on the choppers. Just in case. It’s easy to get myopic, too focused on Rusch as the target. That’s the most obvious, but it could also be way off base.”
“Already on it. Two members of my task force are meeting right now with the Special Agent in Charge of the Secret Service Presidential Protective Division. He’s putting together a list of agents and staff who were aboard both choppers. There were also some journalists on the Stallion.”
“Yeah, but journalists don’t make enemies.”
Uzi smirked.
“Okay, so they make enemies. But not the kind who’d go to the trouble of killing the VP just to knock off a White House press correspondent.” DeSantos’s gaze lingered somewhere behind Uzi. “Your curvaceous spook is approaching.”
Uzi was tempted to look, but thought better of it. “Give me a few minutes, then we can head over to the base.”
DeSantos grunted. “Go do your thing, boychick. I’ll do mine. When you’re ready, come get me.” He winked, then walked off.
Uzi nonchalantly turned, caught sight of Leila Harel, and headed in her direction. She was wearing terrain-appropriate boots, with black form-fitting tights stretched from her narrow waist down her long legs to her ankles. Clutching a clipboard against her chest, she knelt to examine something on the ground.
“What do you see?” Uzi asked. He was standing behind her and just off to her left.
Without turning, she said, “Charred dirt.” She lifted a handful and sifted it through her slender fingers.
He noted her manicured red nails, then said, “Charred dirt. Strange thing to find at a crash site, don’t you think?”
Still facing the ground, she said, “No.”
Uzi frowned. His attempt at humor passed right through her, like an apparition. “What agency are you with?”
She did not answer.
“If I had to guess, and that certainly seems to be the case, I’d say you look like CIA.” He rubbed his chin in mock thought. “Yeah, I’d say CIA.”
Leila tossed the rest of the dirt to the ground, then slowly uncoiled her legs and stood. “I thought you were here to investigate the wreck.” She turned her body, shoulders first, followed by her hips and legs. The form-fitting tights were complemented by a red turtleneck that clung to her full breasts.
Uzi felt his eyes wander down to admire the sweater before he abruptly brought them up to her face. Her comment about him investigating the wreck was mocking him, taking his stammering remark from last night and throwing it back in his face. But after the split second of embarrassment, he realized that she had remembered exactly what he had said.
“There are a lot of things here to investigate, it would seem,” he said with sudden confidence. As he held her gaze, he could see a slight wavering in her eyes. There was warmth buried inside, though she worked to keep it hidden. “So am I right, CIA?”
“You’re very persistent, Agent Uziel.”
And she remembered my name. “Call me Uzi.”
“Calling you by a nickname would imply a certain casualness to our relationship that we don’t have.”
Uzi shrugged. “Not really. No one uses my last name, not even people who hate my guts.”
Leila’s phone began to ring. She reached into her shoulder-slung purse, answered the call, then turned her back on him. After waiting a few moments, Uzi walked off to find DeSantos.
“That thing I was working on.” DeSantos held up his BlackBerry as Uzi approached. “Got something.”
Uzi waited a beat, but DeSantos did not elaborate. “You gonna keep it a secret?”
DeSantos glanced around to make sure no one was nearby. His gaze still off somewhere, he said, “Word is that ARM had a hand in this.”
Uzi chuckled. “ARM had a hand? Is that a joke?”
“No boychick, no joke. Reliable intel. American Revolution Militia.”
“My focus since — well, since 9/11—has been foreign. Bureau’s all about counterterrorism and counterintelligence. ARM’s domestic. I’m a little thin here. Help me out.”
DeSantos buttoned his wool overcoat while formulating his thoughts. “I pulled together some info this morning, so I’ve got the basics. They came together about thirty years ago. Dude named Jeremiah Flint started a chapter in West Virginia that grew slowly over time. Then Jeremiah was gunned down during a routine traffic stop in Arlington.”
“That must’ve gone over real well.”
“Better than you think. He became a martyr. The new guy who took over focused them, started running them as a business. We may have a copy of their charter on file. I’ll pull it. Basically, they’re like most militias: they don’t like the government. They think everything should be handled at a local level. They dispute just about anything that restricts them or takes their money: the Constitution, the IRS, the Federal Reserve, our court system. You know the deal.”
Indeed he did. Patriot groups like The Freemen, and disasters like Ruby Ridge and Waco were required reading at the Academy. “The JTTF keeps up on domestic threats, but we’ve had our eye on homegrown Islamic radicals. They travel in different universes than domestic militias.”
What Uzi kept to himself was that the man in charge of his task force’s domestic terrorism unit happened to be the agent he just put on report: Jake Osborn.
“What makes the American Revolution Militia different from all the other crazy groups out there?”
DeSantos smiled, then slipped both hands into his jacket pockets. “Top of the list, my man, is that none of the others is suspected of trying to assassinate the vice president of the United States.”
Leaving DeSantos’s red Corvette at the crash site and taking Uzi’s Tahoe, they drove to the ARM compound, a heavily wooded parcel set on gently undulating hills just east of Vienna, Virginia. While en route, DeSantos read Uzi a hastily prepared intelligence brief to give him a deeper sense of what — and who — they would be facing on their arrival. After finishing the three page summary, DeSantos suggested they arrive unannounced, even though he expected the guards to be on full alert because of the helicopters’ downing — particularly if they’d had a hand in their demise.
Uzi stopped the car in front of the eight-foot-tall masonry wall topped with sharp razor wire. “They mean business,” he said, eyeing the barricade.
DeSantos ripped open a Juicy Fruit pack and folded a stick into his mouth. “If they’re anything like my source described, we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Uzi continued on to the main entrance, a fortified wrought-iron, motor-driven gate on wheels. A guard shack stood on a concrete slab off to the side. As the Tahoe’s tires crunched the gravel road near the gate, a man dressed in combat fatigues and thick Remington camo boots emerged from the shed with a submachine gun clutched between his hands. He took a position behind the gate, legs spread wide.