The possibilities I was picturing were endless, and each new one seemed more terrifying to imagine than the last.
“He could use it anywhere,” I said. “A concert at the Garden. A big sports event in a packed stadium. Rockefeller Center. What are the big events in town this weekend?”
“He could go for Wall Street,” Aparo added. “The New York Stock Exchange. A hit like that would crash the markets big-time.”
Then I thought that if this was going to be a terror strike, there was a far more crippling set of targets he could go for. “The Capitol,” I suggested. “The White House.”
Sokolov’s attention perked up. “He asked me about bulletproof glass,” he said.
“What?”
“He asked me if it could go through it. Something about three-inch glass.”
“Blast-proof. The kind they use in major government buildings in DC,” I said.
I could already see it. A packed session on Capitol Hill-then, out of the blue, senators and congressmen start ripping one another’s eyes out with security officers shooting indiscriminately, the whole thing broadcast live on C-SPAN.
Or even worse.
A Secret Service detail going haywire during a press conference on the White House lawn and gunning down everyone in sight, including the president of the United States.
“I need to call someone,” I said. “We can’t just do nothing.”
“Who?” Aparo asked.
I thought about it, then said, “Everett.”
Will Everett was an SAC at our DC field office and ran its counterterrorism division. We’d known each other for a few years and worked well together. I needed someone with a bit of an imagination for this. Someone who knew me and knew I wasn’t prone to flights of fancy. Someone who wouldn’t think I was stoned when I told him what was going on.
As I reached for my phone, I wasn’t even sure I could be fully open with Everett. I thought it might be better if I sounded him out first. Just let him know something was in play, could be nothing, could be serious. And play it by ear depending on his reaction.
The conversation ended up being much shorter than I anticipated. He was having a busy day. A lot of liaising with the Secret Service and DC police.
The White House Correspondents Dinner was taking place in less than three hours’ time.
67
For a psychopath who was out to strike at the heart of America’s identity-an identity defined by freedom of expression, meritocracy, and a free press’s access to the highest levels of state-I couldn’t think of a more significant target than the White House Correspondents Dinner. Especially when this target came with guaranteed maximum media exposure.
They call it the nerd prom, hashtag and all, which is appropriate if you consider George Clooney and Sofía Vergara to be nerds. More than two and a half thousand of the nation’s most influential people-politicians, Hollywood celebrities, journalists, business leaders, and Supreme Court justices, among others-would be packed into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton for an evening of high-octane glamour that had all the glitz of the Oscars but without the interminable running time, the false modesty, or the embarrassment of cut-short acceptance speeches.
And not even the Oscars could boast the president of the United States as its guest of honor.
The gala had been broadcast live on C-SPAN for years, but in the last few years, with politics in America more polarized than ever and political humor more pointed than ever, it had become a huge mainstream event. Multiple entertainment outlets on television and online would be covering it due to its high-wattage celebrity host and attendees, who were all there as guests of the Association’s members.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was too potent a target for Koschey to pass up, even at such short notice.
He’d have plenty of other opportunities where the president would be present, of course. Welcoming speeches for foreign dignitaries on the White House lawn, cultural events at the Kennedy Center, major state functions-there was something big going on every week in the capital. But this one bested them all. Any attack on the president would be disastrous enough, but an attack that struck at the heart of not only the world’s press, but of the entertainment industry-and that also hit some of the most outspoken and influential voices in America-would be any terrorist’s perfect storm. Not to mention the implicit reprisal it would be for the 2011 dinner, which would always be remembered as part of the narrative that led to the killing, one day later, of bin Laden by SEAL Team Six.
It was tight, but if Koschey was going to do something, this felt like one hell of a night to do it.
“We’ve got to get down there,” I told them, then turned to Larisa and gestured at Sokolov. “And he’s coming with us.”
She didn’t hesitate. “So am I.”
I wasn’t sure about that. I raised a stern finger. “You can’t give your guys a heads-up. I don’t have time to lock horns with any welcoming party when we hit DC.”
“There won’t be one,” she said. “You’ve got my word on that.”
68
I looked out the window of our Bureau chopper and watched, with mounting anxiety, as the Statue of Liberty glided by in the late-afternoon light.
The president was scheduled to arrive at the Hilton in a little over two hours, and we’d be stuck in here and belted to our seats for more than half that time. It didn’t help that I knew that Koschey probably already had his plan all sorted out, whereas in our case, I wasn’t at all sure how we were going to handle this.
For starters, I couldn’t see how my talking to the Secret Service about this was going to work out, even with Everett there as my character reference. What was I going to tell them? “I have this hunch that there’s a clear and present threat from one man, but we have no description, name, or prints to give you. Oh, and he’s going to use some kind of microwave transmitter to turn you all into killers and have one of you gun down the president.”
That was going to be a fun conversation.
Not only could I see them not believing me, I could picture them detaining me for questioning, wondering what the hell I was playing at and what motives I had for making such an outlandish claim.
I wasn’t even sure we should tell them about what was going on, given that it was all based on a hunch. Then again, we couldn’t not tell them. Not with what was at stake. Worst case, nothing would happen and they’d think I’m ripe for a pink slip and a straightjacket. Best case, we save the leader of the free world. No contest. But the more I thought it through, the more I realized that we were probably going to be on our own. They weren’t going to give it the attention it deserved.
In a perverse way, deep down, I was hoping Koschey would be there, trying to pull this off. Despite the huge risk, despite my fear that the night could turn out to be a disaster of epic proportions for our country, at least we knew what he was up to and had a chance to take him down. If I was wrong and he wasn’t going to be there, if he wasn’t planning what I thought he was planning, then we would have no idea where or when he, or whoever he delivered the technology to, would surface again and use it. It could be in a day, a week, a year… Could be anywhere. We’d be clueless. And the disaster we would face in that uncertain future would be far more likely to succeed since we would be completely unprepared for it, and because of that, its outcome could be far worse. Far worse because it could also be much bigger. At least at the correspondents dinner, Koschey wouldn’t be able to hook it up to a whole network of cell towers. Or at least I hoped he wouldn’t be able to. But that would be a real possibility in the not-too-distant future, as Sokolov had confirmed. Which was another reason I was hoping we’d have a chance to take him down right away.