Pugin raised his arms high above his head as if he’d just scored a goal. “And… they are done.”
Bobkova shook her head in disgust, as much for her thoughts of Dudko as this operative with the hairy ears.
Pugin rolled his chair away from the table and pointed his pencil at the session data that was now scrolling down his computer screen. “I told you she would be hungry.”
Bobkova walked over and bent down to get a better look. Pugin’s cologne was actually quite nice once it had a chance to wear off a bit — or perhaps she was just nose-blind to it.
“See, a table for two at a Morton’s steakhouse.” Pugin made a note of the login and password she used for the reservation website. They would use it to try and gain access to Chadwick’s other applications.
Bobkova watched in real time as Michelle Chadwick — or possibly her carp-lipped boy toy using her phone — made seven-o’clock dinner reservations in Crystal City. Bobkova knew the place well. Morton’s steakhouse faced the street but had another entrance inside the underground mall. Her meeting with Reza Kazem had taken place across from the Starbucks in the very shadow of the restaurant. She often ran along the Mount Vernon Trail, which followed the Potomac across the street.
Bobkova folded her arms, pacing the length of the hotel room several times as she thought through the particulars of this location.
There would be enough people to offer the right amount of panic and melee, making the killing highly visible — as Dudko had instructed. There were several other restaurants in the vicinity — seafood, tapas, noodles, even a place that specialized in bison. Some diners would drive, but many would come and go via the Metro, funneling them right past Morton’s to reach the terminal. The crowds would at once provide the necessary witnesses and cover their escape.
Bobkova had studied the security cameras in the Crystal City Underground in advance of her previous meeting with Reza Kazem. Then, she’d wanted to be seen, but such preparation was a habit. She’d send Gorev to check the area again and disable the camera directly in front of the restaurant on Crystal Drive.
Ideally, Bobkova would have liked a little more time to build her file, but Dudko insisted she rush things. Bobkova was smart enough to see what he was up to. Certain news stories were already being written, little flames that thousands of Internet bots would fan into a larger fire across the Web, “liking,” tweeting, sharing, commenting. Monday-morning drive-time radio loved a good conspiracy. More tweets would follow, many of these from real people, helped along by the bot army. One story would bolster another until even the most cynical began to doubt their convictions.
Mundus vult decipi—the world wanted to be deceived.
Senator Chadwick would die tonight — and the American people, or at least a substantial portion of them, would blame the man who she accused of having his own assassination squad, the man who stood to gain the most peace from her death: President Jack Ryan.
41
Reza Kazem sat behind the wheel of the stolen Fath Safir — Iran’s answer to the Jeep CJ 4x4—and shielded his eyes from the sun as the gigantic plane crabbed into a stiff wind over the makeshift airstrip. A woman in her fifties sat in the passenger seat, hunched over a small notebook in which she made frequent notes with a pencil she kept behind her ear. She wore red lipstick and dark eyeliner, but the pencil appeared to be her only jewelry. A lock of steel-gray hair escaped the scarf and blew across her face, but she left it there, engrossed in whatever she was doing. She hardly ever spoke, except to herself — with whom she carried on many lively conversations that she noted in her little book.
Overhead, the Il-76’s engines screamed as it came in on final approach. Carved out of the desert in the valley east of Mashhad, the runway provided an adequate, if not ideal, landing spot for the Ilyushin. The strip was fifteen hundred meters — a thousand meters short of what the airplane would need to take off again had it been loaded to maximum weight.
Reza Kazem didn’t care about that. In a short time, it would be some seventy-four thousand kilograms lighter.
The woman in the Safir’s passenger seat looked up suddenly at the sound of the engines, startled from her stupor.
“Tell your people to take great caution putting the missiles inside the launch tubes.”
Kazem drummed long fingers against the steering wheel. “Two hours and thirty-six minutes until the next American satellite passes overhead. It is better the Great Satan does not see what we are up to, don’t you think?”
“This is true,” the woman said, her voice dripping with condescension. “But the great accuracy we require will be lost if the components are damaged even in the slightest way. Secrecy will not matter if we cannot hit what we are aiming at.” She went back to her book for a moment, then suddenly looked up.
“Do you shoot?”
Kazem nodded. “I have, on occasion, fired a weapon.”
“Are you very good?” A professor of engineering, she spoke bluntly, unaware of any possible consequences for the words that escaped her lips.
“I suppose,” Kazem said.
“I want you to think of this,” she said. “Imagine one of your friends fires an average mortar over your head. This round travels at, say, sixteen hundred meters — or approximately one mile — per second. You are tasked with shooting this projectile out of the air with your Kalashnikov, which shoots a projectile that travels at approximately seven hundred meters per second. The mortar is a larger target, but traveling over twice as fast. You’d want the best bullet possible, would you not?”
“That is exactly what I would want,” Kazem said.
“Then please,” the woman said, “be careful with the missiles. The analogy I posed is not far off from what you propose we do.”
42
Special Agent in Charge Gary Montgomery sent two agents from Presidential Protection in separate cars to park down the street from Senator Michelle Chadwick’s apartment as soon as he’d gotten off the phone with President Ryan. Once the trigger was pulled to get things moving, he called his bosses. It took less than ten minutes to be conferenced in with Director Howe and his right hand, Deputy Director Kenna Mendez, and a Service lawyer. There always had to be a lawyer.
There was the usual worry about protecting the good name of the Secret Service. The way the lawyer saw it, this operation could go three ways: nothing happened, in which case all was rosy; Secret Service personnel saved Senator Chadwick from an assassination, and all was rosy; or something got bungled, Chadwick died, and the Service looked inept — or, even worse, responsible. Director Howe and DD Mendez had almost fifty years of experience between them. Both had cut their teeth as post-standers, criminal investigators, protective agents, supervisors, and eventually SAICs of large field offices. They knew the vagaries that an agent in the field had to deal with. The fact that this was a covert detail — Chadwick had not asked for protection, and should not even know she was being protected — added an extra level of difficulty. Without knowledge of her schedule they would lose the ability to conduct advance surveys of locations before arrival. Everything would be a seat-of-the-pants move. Doing this right — and the Secret Service prided itself in providing flawless protection — was next to impossible.
The lawyer pointed out that while there was nothing illegal about Secret Service agents following the senator unannounced as long as they did not spy on her, they were under no statutory obligation to do so. The operation would probably violate policy on several points, and possibly some federal rules in regard to overtime pay, but he would have to research it. Montgomery groaned at that. Given enough time to look, government lawyers could find a way to make anything against the rules.