Less than two minutes later, we circled high and well wide of the Kerry Animal Hospital. The tan van was gone, but the burgundy Toyota Camry was still there. We got an angle and binoculars on the license plate. It was the missing security guard’s car.
“Land right in the parking lot,” Mahoney said.
“We lose the surprise factor,” one of the SWAT agents said.
I said, “There was a tan panel van here when we flew by. I saw it. We need to know who or what’s in it.”
Mahoney said into his mike, “Cap, can you call Virginia State Police or the local sheriff? Get them to cordon off this area and look for a tan panel van? Don’t have a license plate.”
“Done,” Carstensen said.
The SWAT team went first, storming the veterinary hospital from all four sides.
They threw flash-bang grenades the second they were all in position and then went in.
Thirty seconds after they entered, our radios crackled with urgency.
“We’ve got two alive,” the SWAT team leader barked. “Goldberg and the vet. Rest of the place is clear.”
The pilot began to speak, but I cut him off.
“Get us back in the air!” I shouted. “We’ve got to find that van!”
Chapter 89
Early Sunday morning, Kristina Varjan was traveling north on County Road 610 in a black Audi Q5. She lowered the driver-side window and picked up a black Glock pistol with an after-market sound suppressor.
There was forest on both sides of the lightly traveled road. She waited until she could see a long empty stretch in the other lane before sliding the pistol out the window, resting the barrel on the side mirror, and stomping on the gas. The Audi roared and closed the gap between it and the tan van ahead of her in seconds.
Varjan knew she had one good chance of this working. If she missed the opportunity, the equation changed, tilted against her.
She drove up behind the van and weaved slightly right, toward the shoulder of the road, giving her a good look at the van’s rear tires. Varjan shot them both out with hollow-point bullets.
She slammed on her brakes. The van swerved hard into the other lane, tires smoking as they disintegrated. The van’s back end swung around almost a hundred and eighty degrees.
Varjan saw the horrified look on the driver’s face before the van careered sideways off the far shoulder. It had smashed and rolled over twice before she brought the Audi to a screeching stop. The assassin jumped from her car and sprinted across the narrow road and down the short embankment.
There was tire smoke in the air, but no smell of spilling gas, so she went straight to the van, which had landed more or less upright. The roof and side door were partially caved in. Blood dripped down the driver’s face as he lifted his head to look at her.
“Help,” he said.
She shot him between the eyes.
Varjan moved down the side of the van and around the back, seeing one door shut and the other almost torn off. Gun up, she looked inside and saw the ruins of a full ambulance setup. A woman was sprawled on the floor by an overturned gurney. She was bleeding and struggling to move. Varjan shot her through the top of her head before checking behind the closed door.
No one.
She heard a soft thump and a twig snapping. She jerked back, then took two cautious steps toward the opposite side of the van, where the sounds had come from. When she took a quick peek, she saw nothing but burned brush and the edge of the woods.
She pivoted back the other way, but it was too late.
Quiet as a leopard, Cruz had slipped up behind her, and now he stuck the muzzle of his pistol against her forehead.
“You didn’t think it was gonna be that easy, did you, Varjan?”
Chapter 90
Route 17, southeast toward the town of Brera and I-95, was my best guess of where the president’s assassin was headed. Mahoney thought so too.
But when we lifted off, we immediately saw a plume of black smoke rising above the forest canopy not far to the northeast. Give credit to Ned’s instincts. He told the pilot to check it out before we went all the way to the interstate.
We flew over a lumberyard and a farm toward a big chunk of forest. Within it, the black smoke had quickly become flames that fully engulfed the van, and now the fire was dying down.
“Get us on the pavement,” Mahoney said.
As we swung around to land, I punched in 911 and was surprised to be almost instantly connected to a dispatcher for Stafford County emergency services. After identifying myself, I reported the fire and asked that the Storck road be closed in both directions.
We touched down north of the van. The flames coming from it were all but done, leaving the smoking, scorched shell. Tendrils of fire were consuming leaves and pine needles but not spreading widely or rapidly; they were hampered by the recent wet conditions.
I went toward the burning vehicle, stopped at a safe distance, and used the pocket binoculars I always carry to study it.
“Body in the front seat,” I said.
Mahoney had already gone down the bank, and was looking at the van from behind through his own binoculars. “And a second in the back here.”
We heard the first sirens in the distance. I knew the fire trucks would want to get close, and there’d be hoses, and water, and boots.
While Mahoney called for an FBI forensics team, I lowered my binoculars and got out my cell phone. I walked past the van and started taking pictures of the scene, especially the skid marks that told a story in reverse from the tire tracks in the softer soil on the shoulder where it left the road to the beginning of the skids a good eighty yards beyond.
Right away I saw that there could be two vehicles involved, the van and another one that had come to a stop almost parallel to the wreck. Was this second set of marks from before?
If the marks had ended anywhere but in front of the van, I might have discounted them. But they did stop by the van, so I went on the assumption that they were new.
Had someone seen the accident, stopped, saw the van was on fire, and left? Who? And why hadn’t that person called it in?
I looked beyond the start of the van’s skid, no more than forty feet, and saw what seemed at first to be a piece of tire rubber. I walked to it and realized that it was actually a shard of pavement about three inches long and the shape and thickness of my pinkie.
I saw the gouge in the road where the little finger had come from, and then behind that and to the left, I saw another gouge and two pieces of asphalt. As I photographed it all, I heard the sirens closing on our position from two directions. I looked north and saw the flashing red lights of a fire truck, followed by the lights of an ambulance.
I ran toward the smoking wreckage of the van. Mahoney had come back up the bank onto the road and was talking to Susan Carstensen on the radio.
The van was no longer burning, just belching caustic smoke.
“Anything?” Mahoney called to me.
“Don’t let them spray down the van. I want a closer look at it just as it is,” I said. “And let’s keep them away from those skid marks until forensics gets here.”
Ned nodded and turned to meet the firemen. I scrambled down into the ditch and got much closer to the van.
The metal was still throwing enough heat that I had to stop a good fifteen feet away. After shooting a video and stills of the scene from that perspective, I used the binoculars again to study the corpse in the front seat.
The jaw was frozen open, not unusual for a burn victim. Though the face was charred beyond recognition, I could make out big fissures in the skin where it had split in the heat, several on what was left of his cheeks, and another that started between the eye sockets and ran up onto the forehead.