“That’s what I’m being told.”
“We’ll get the fuckers, Mac. I swear to God, we’ll get them and hang them by their balls.”
“You can count on it,” McGarvey said tightly.
All hell was breaking loose, and Maryland Prince Georges County deputy sheriff Dale Zuber figured he wasn’t going home anytime soon. Listening to the chatter on the radio in his police cruiser, it sounded as if every cop from Baltimore to D.C. had been called out. There’d been some sort of terrorist attack up in Montgomery County and the feds were hot to bag the bad guys. Every inch of the state was being searched with a fine-toothed comb, and he figured the cop who got lucky would get an extra stripe. It was a promotion he desperately needed because of the new house. The payments were killing him.
He’d been heading south on Ritchie Road parallel with I-95 toward Forestville, where he usually stopped for coffee around this time of night, when he decided to take a quick pass through the park. Sometimes on slow nights he made the panty run to roust out the kids parked up there, but as he came around a curve in the park road, his mouth dropped open and he pulled up short.
“Prince Georges, Zuber. I have a helicopter down in Walker Mill Park,” he radioed. “Looks empty. Stand by.”
“Roger,” the dispatcher replied. “Approach with extreme caution. Backup units are en route.”
Zuber got out of his car, put on his campaign hat and drew his service pistol and flashlight as he stepped off the road and headed across the grassy field. The chopper was parked about fifty yards away at the edge of a stand of trees. It was dark, but he could see that the side doors were open and no one seemed to be inside.
In the distance he could hear sirens, but other than that the night was very quiet.
He stopped twenty feet from the helicopter and shined his flashlight into the main compartment, then let the beam slide forward to the windshield as he slowly walked around to the front of the machine.
Something had splashed on the Plexiglas window. He spotted that at the same moment he saw a figure slumped forward in the pilot’s seat. He shined the light on the figure and his stomach did a slow roll. The pilot, dressed in a light-colored shirt, was obviously dead. The entire side of his head and forehead were gone, nothing but a mass of blood. He’d probably been shot in the back of his head at point-blank range.
Zuber keyed his shoulder mike. “Prince Georges, Zuber, requesting a medical unit. The helicopter pilot appears to have been shot in the head.”
He stepped around to the opposite side of the helicopter and shined his light in the main compartment again. It was empty, except for what appeared to be black uniforms or jumpsuits. “Jesus,” he said out loud. The pilot had brought them here, they’d killed him for his efforts on their behalf, changed clothes and then took off.
Zuber shined his light on the ground around the helicopter, and immediately picked out several sets of footprints leading across the field toward the road.
This is going to be a long night, indeed, he told himself.
Otto Rencke was in his element, finally doing something that had real meaning. But he was frightened, because for every answer he found, a dozen questions popped up, spreading outward faster than even he could keep up with.
The computers up here were even better than those down at Archives in Fort A.P. Hill, because he had designed much of the system. And yet there wasn’t a decent computer that could do what even a stupid human was capable of doing, and that was think intuitively.
He sat back and idly stuffed a Twinkle in his mouth as his eyes roamed to each of the three screens and three printers that were pulling up information his specially designed search engine was looking for. Anomalies, McGarvey called them. The questions — answered or unanswered — that seemed to stick out. The ones that didn’t seem to fit a pattern. Obvious questions, like where the thimble was hidden when it was in plain sight.
Three minutes ago he’d monitored the deputy sheriff’s call about the downed helicopter and the dead pilot. He stared at one of the printers. Never mind how the terrorists got into the air to fly their paragliders to the safe house; he would find out about that later. They made their attack and got away aboard a helicopter which took them to a park southwest of Washington. But what happened next? Either someone was waiting with a getaway car, or they’d left an escape vehicle there. They killed the pilot and drove where? A hideout? In Rencke’s mind he could see a car or van racing through the night, using back roads and deserted streets, finally pulling into a parking garage behind some abandoned factory somewhere.
He sat forward. The cars or vans they used and the hideout they escaped to, as well as the helicopter, had to have been arranged by Sandy Patterson and the Far East Trade Association.
He pulled up the file he’d been working with. Among the dummy groups Far East had set up were three on the Beltway: Digital Systems Engineering, the Quantum Research Group and Microchip Applications, Inc., all of them with lucrative government contracts.
He cleared the screen and began with Digital Systems. Two questions needed answering: Where did the escape vehicles come from, and where had the terrorists stored their equipment, planned the attack and bunked?
Since taking over the DO, McGarvey had gotten very little sleep and almost no rest. The position wasn’t so much of a job as it was a way of life. No wonder so many Agency people had deep personal problems. The Company was a human meat grinder; steak in, hamburger out.
Coming in low from the southeast, he could see the flashing lights of a lot of vehicles on the highway and the driveway and bobbing lights crisscrossing the open fields and woods surrounding the house. It looked like a carnival, and from the air he couldn’t see any outward signs that anything bad had happened. But it had. Paul Isaacson and a lot of good people had died down there. Giving their lives to protect his family, who’d been attacked simply because of what he was, because of what he did for a living. The same black rage he’d felt on the Canal Bridge after the Georgetown bombing threatened to block out his sanity, but he struggled to fight it. This time he was going to have to be much stronger. He needed to keep his head until he found the bastards and killed them. This time there would be no mistakes.
The marine helicopter touched down on the lawn in front of the house, completely surrounded by police cruisers, some unmarked government cars and a half-dozen ambulances. Bodies were being brought from the woods behind the house, and dozens of uniformed cops stood around with little or nothing to do.
McGarvey unbuckled and started to get out, but the six marines were faster. They jumped to the ground and formed a tight half circle in front of the door, their weapons at the ready.
“Clear,” their sergeant said. He turned back. “Okay, Mr. McGarvey.”
“What the hell?” McGarvey mumbled, but then he realized that Murphy would have ordered the marine guard for him in case there were any terrorists left behind in the woods who’d take the suicide shot in order to kill the DDO. It was a chilling thought, even for McGarvey.
Fred Rudolph came over from a knot of men who’d been having a conference in front of an evidence van. The marines kept a close watch on him.
He and McGarvey shook hands. “Nobody thought they’d come in from the air.”
“Wouldn’t have happened if this place wasn’t on your Website,” McGarvey said.
A pained look crossed Rudolph’s face. He was under a lot of strain and it showed. “We have a place set up for them—”
McGarvey cut him off. “They’re coming with me.”
“Where are you taking them?”