Within five minutes of the ringing phone, Clark tapped on her door.
“I’m awake,” she said.
John stepped in. “How are you feeling?”
“A little sore, but better than I would have been if you hadn’t made me keep the ice on my face, I’m sure.”
John said, “I have to go to Hendley Associates. Something critical has come up. I hate to do this to you, but Jack made me promise to stay with you at all times till he gets back.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“We’ve got a couple of beds there for data guys who work the night shift. It’s not the Ritz, but neither is this.”
Melanie slid out of the bed. “I finally get to see the mysterious Hendley Associates? Trust me, I don’t plan on sleeping.”
Clark smiled. “Not so fast, young lady. You’ll get to see the lobby, an elevator, and a hallway or two. You’ll have to wait for Jack to come back to get the VIP tour.”
Melanie sighed while putting on her shoes. “Yeah, like that will happen. Okay, Mr. Clark. If you promise to not treat me like a prisoner, I promise to not snoop around your office.”
Clark held the door open for her as she passed. “It’s a deal.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
Gavin sat in his office at one in the morning. On his desk in front of him was a technical manual from Microsoft that he’d been reading on and off for the entire day. It was not uncommon for him to work this late, and he imagined he’d be pulling a long string of all-nighters over the next few days while he rebuilt his system. He’d sent most of his staff home, but a couple of programmers were still somewhere on the floor; he’d heard them talking a few minutes earlier.
Since The Campus had men in the field he also knew there would be several guys up in Analysis, although there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do but doodle on notepads without a computer network to assist them.
Biery felt like he’d let everyone down by allowing the virus onto his system. He worried about Ding, Sam, and Dom in Beijing, and even Ryan in Hong Kong, and he concentrated on getting back online as quickly as possible.
Right now it looked like they would not be able to go live for at least another week.
The phone rang on Biery’s desk.
“Hey, Gav, it’s Granger. Gerry and I are up here in his office, waiting for word from Chavez. We figured you might be down there.”
“Yeah. Lots to do.”
“Understood. Listen, John Clark is coming into the office in just a few minutes. He is going to back up Chavez and the others on a new operation that is brewing in Beijing.”
“Good. Nice to know he’s back with us, even if it’s just temporary.”
“I was wondering if you could come up when he gets here and give him a ten-minute review of what happened in Hong Kong. It will help get him back in the loop.”
“I’d be glad to. I’ll be here all night, all day tomorrow. I can spare a little time.”
“Don’t burn yourself out, Gavin. Nothing that happened with that virus was your fault. I don’t need you to fall on your sword over this.”
Gavin snorted a little. “Should have caught it, Sam. Simple as that.”
Granger said, “Look. All we can tell you is that we support you. Gerry and I both think you’re doing a hell of a job.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“Try and get some sleep tonight. You’re no good to anyone if you can’t function.”
“Okay. I’ll catch some z’s on my sofa as soon as I give Clark his briefing.”
“Good deal. I’ll call you when he gets here.”
Gavin hung up the phone, reached for his coffee, and then, without warning, all the power in his office went off.
Sitting in the black, he looked out into the hallway.
“Dammit!” he shouted. The lights seemed to be out over the entire building.
“Son of a bitch!”
In the lobby of Hendley Associates, night security manager Wayne Reese looked out the glass doorway to the parking lot and saw the Baltimore Gas and Electric truck pull up to the door.
Reese reached down to the Beretta pistol on his hip, and he thumbed the leather strap that secured it in the holster. This did not feel right.
One man walked up to the front door and held his ID badge up. Reese stepped up to the door, shone his flashlight on the badge, and determined that it looked legitimate. He turned the bolt lock and opened the door slightly.
“You guys sure are on the ball tonight. The power hasn’t been off three—”
Reese saw the black handgun appear from the man’s tool belt, and he knew he’d made a grave error. With all the speed he could muster he slammed the glass door, but a single round barked from the suppressed Five-seveN pistol, shot through the narrow opening, and hit him in the solar plexus, knocking him back onto the floor.
As Reese lay on his back, he tried to lift his head to see his murderer. The Asian man pushed through the unlocked door and stepped up to him. Behind him, several more men appeared out of the back of the van.
The shooter stood over Reese, raised his pistol to the wounded man’s forehead, and then Wayne Reese’s world went black.
Crane entered the building just as Quail shot the security officer a second time. Crane and five of his men shouldered their Steyr TMP machine pistols and took the stairs, leaving Grouse on the ground floor to watch the parking lot. One at the entrance was not optimal, but Grouse had a headset that kept him in constant touch with the rest of the operators, so he would serve more as a tripwire if there were any threats downstairs.
Crane knew tonight would be taxing on his small force. He had lost Wigeon this morning during the attempted assassination of Melanie Kraft on the Rock Creek Parkway. Additionally, Grouse had been shot in the left thigh. He should have been out of action with this injury, but Crane had ordered him to come on this operation tonight, principally because the Hendley Associates building was quite large, and therefore Crane needed all the men he could muster.
The building was nine stories tall, impossible to clear and search with this force, but Crane knew from Ryan’s phone intercepts and Center’s research on the Hendley Associates network before it went dark the previous day that the second floor was IT, the third floor was the intelligence analyst staff, and the ninth floor was the location of the executive offices.
At the second-floor exit, three men peeled off of the six-man tactical train. They would search here and then on the third floor, while Crane and two others rushed directly up to the top floor.
Quail, Snipe, and Stint moved up the darkened second-floor hallway with their silenced machine pistols at the high ready.
A security officer walking with a flashlight in his hand came out of a room backward, locking the door behind him, and then he turned to head back to the stairwell. Stint shot the man four times, killing him instantly.
In a large office toward the back of the IT department, the three Chinese operators found a heavyset white man in his fifties at his desk. His office door said he was Gavin Biery, the director of information technology.
The men had been ordered to take everyone who did not offer resistance alive and keep them alive until the network system could be rebooted and the drives reformatted. There were references to Center, Tong, Zha, and several of the operations that linked Center to the Chinese PLA and MSS, and these needed to be scrubbed from the hard drives of the servers before the company became front-page news after a mass murder there.