42
GUNFIRE RATCHETED FROM THE UPPER stories, distant, pop-gun sounds. Glass shattered and spilled from a window, crashing to the street below. The gunfire cracked louder. Smoke began billowing out. Confused shouts echoed from the fire team in Lisa’s radio.
“What’s our status?” Lisa demanded. “What’s our status? Did we get them?”
More gunfire. A confused flurry of shouts.
“Smoke bomb!… A-squad?… A-squad? Timmons? Door’s jammed! Ram it!”
“What’s going on?” Lisa demanded.
The squad com crackled alive with someone coughing. “No worries. We’ve got it under control. Our friends had a little surprise for us. We’ve got a couple people down. We sucked something nasty. We’ll need paramedics.”
“What about our targets?”
A small hesitation. “Looks like they’re going to need medics, too.”
“What?” Lisa demanded. “They’re still alive? I’m going to have your ass—” She glanced over her shoulder at the street. FBI units were rolling up now. Nothing happened in DC without their taking interest.
Worse and worse.
She spun away and cupped her mouth to her com. “What the hell did I tell you?” she whispered fiercely.
“Come on,” Timmons protested. “We got them already. They’re just kids.”
Simon Banks was striding over, his face white.
Lisa snagged George Saamsi. “They’re still alive,” she hissed.
Saamsi’s eyes went from her to Banks. “Finish it,” he growled as he went to intercept his partner.
“Clean up the mess,” Lisa murmured into her radio. “Do you understand? Clean it up.”
News trucks were showing up now. The situation was turning into a goddamn media bloodbath. Worse, the FBI’s badges had gotten past her people’s blockades. Cops and FBI were swarming toward the building.
“Cops are coming your way,” she said. “Finalize this.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yes, it’s a goddamn order, Timmons! Get rid of those kids!”
Lisa waited, holding her breath. Come on, Timmons. Get it together.
Gunfire cracked in her earpiece.
Once. Twice.
On the streets, everyone panicked and scattered for cover, but Lisa sagged with relief.
Her com crackled alive again.
“It’s done.”
“Good,” she snapped. “Now clean up the scene and get the hell out of there.”
All around her, the crime scene was crumbling into disarray. Cops and FBI and EMS and Williams & Crowe personnel all sorting through the confusion. Lisa watched with satisfaction as her people made themselves helpfully obstructionist.
Just a few more minutes.
Med-tech people went in, but her strike teams managed to bog down the cops who had been trying to go in with them. Lisa suppressed a grin. There wouldn’t be much left for the cops to reconstruct by the time her people got done in there. It would pass. Timmons’s people knew how to clean up a crime scene.
Lisa grabbed Saamsi. “It’s done. We’re clear.” She jerked her head toward the cops and FBI agents. “We’re going to need some political cover. Let your clients know. We need this to be forgotten.”
“It’s clean?”
“Just a couple of crazy activists with guns.” Lisa shrugged.
George got on his cell and started working through his contacts. Soon, phones would be ringing all over the city. Congressional offices, DC police headquarters, and the FBI would all be hearing from patrons and friends. The investigation would die. Someone in George’s contact list would take control of the investigation.
And really, what was there to investigate? Tragedies happened all the time. This was just one more example of the radicalization of America. Some lunatic fringe who had drunk the Kool-Aid of Occupy Wall Street rhetoric and gone astray.
An ambulance worker emerged from the building pushing a body bag on a stretcher. Another body followed. The cops started freaking about bodies being moved, which started a larger argument between Williams & Crowe, the cops, and the FBI. Simon Banks saw the body bags and gave a howl of anguish. He fought through the crowd. “Is that my daughter? Is that my daughter?”
He lunged for a body bag, fumbling at the zipper.
“Sir! Sir! Don’t!”
Lisa reached the crowd just as Banks got the bag open. He collapsed, sobbing. Alix Banks lay disheveled and blood-soaked inside the black body bag. Pale and gone. An empty husk. Lisa felt a moment of regret.
Sorry, kid. It didn’t have to be this way.
Banks was clawing at his daughter’s body.
“Alix!”
His hands scrabbled in his daughter’s blood. He clutched at her corpse, trying to hold her to him. Lisa was afraid he was going to knock over the stretcher with his wild grief. She grabbed him and tried to hold him, but he shook her off with a wild strength. It took her and George Saamsi to finally pull him away.
“Simon! Simon! Let them do their work,” George soothed.
News cameras were snapping pictures. We don’t need to be the story. Lisa waved frantically for the EMS people to keep going.
“I’m sorry. Mr. Banks?” She tugged at his shoulder. “There are news cameras. This is starting to turn into an even bigger problem.”
Banks wheeled on her. “What did you do to my daughter?” He took a wild swing, and Lisa leaped back. She could practically feel the flashes of the photojournalists as they caught the scene.
George managed to drag him back. “Alix had a gun, Simon!” His voice was urgent. “It’s a terrible, terrible tragedy, I know. I’m so sorry about your daughter, but there’s nothing Lisa—or anyone—could do.” His voice turned soothing. “What were they supposed to do? She was with a wanted terrorist, and they were armed…” And then, following up, using the words a fellow PR man would understand. “There are cameras running, Simon. We can’t become the story here. We need to be going. You need to grieve in private.”
Lisa had to hand it to him, George Saamsi was good. She left him to the shattered father and went to see what else she could do to cover the damage.
The FBI agent in charge snagged her. “What the hell happened here?” the man asked. “Why can’t anyone get access to a crime scene?”
Lisa shook her head. “Call your boss. I heard it’s a national-security thing. We’re supposed to keep things clear until we get an okay from higher up.”
“Goddamn private armies,” the man muttered, but he got on the phone.
Not a bad operation, overall, Lisa decided. The bodies were disappearing into ambulances, and the crime scene was becoming more and more muddied. In just a little while, all the events that had happened here would be gone. Swept away and forgotten. A small, personal family tragedy among the many larger tragedies that pummeled the nation every day. Not news at all. Maybe a few lines in the Metro section, and then gone for good.
She watched as Saamsi finally managed to get Simon Banks stuffed into a black town car and sent away.
That’s right. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.
Saamsi was coming back across the lawn to her. He was frowning.
“Lisa?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is that man standing in the lobby in his underwear?”
“What?” Lisa whirled.
Timmons was stumbling out of the building, stripped down to his tightie-whities.
“What the…?”
“Gas.” He choked.
“What gas?” Lisa asked.
He knelt down and retched. “Didn’t… get up to the tenth.”
“What do you mean you didn’t make it up to the tenth? You were there. I talked to you!” She grabbed him and pulled him close. “You said you took care of it!”