Nevertheless, they’ve decided to stick to the schedule. I just thought you should know that they’re on their way. Whether we find him or not, this event is going to happen.”
Standing before the open doors of the cargo area, Vanderveen stared with satisfaction at the simple elegance of his creation. It was almost a shame, he thought with a brief smile, that he would soon have to destroy it.
The Ford E-350 van had been purchased from a retired electrician, and the cluttered cargo area looked as if it might contain anything other than 3,000 pounds of high explosives. The previous owner had rigged up handmade wooden shelves that were bolted into the upper portion of the frame, running from back to front the length of the van. Beneath the shelves on either side were broad sheets of flat pegboard, from which hung tools of every type imaginable. All of it had been thrown in for a modest fee by the electrician, who had quickly discovered that retirement was much more expensive than he had anticipated.
Along with the tools had come four large steel trunks that were 32' x 18' x 14'. It had not been enough, of course; after running some quick calculations, and allowing for space for the conduit on top, Will had purchased one additional trunk through a wholesale warehouse in Richmond. Then he had bolted the five steel boxes to the floor of the van. Even with the additional trunk, he still had nearly 25 pounds of the grayish-white material that would not fit in the compartments. He wasn’t bothered by this development, though, as he was sure that the excess could be put to some good use.
His decision to use the trunks had necessitated a slight change in the circuit he had devised, but he still had plenty of number 6 caps at his disposal. At one cap per trunk, there was a little over 37 amperes running through the circuit, but the current moving over each detonator was the same as he had previously calculated: at just over 6.31 amps, it was enough to ensure the destruction of each cap, but not so much as to run the risk of an electrical arc, which would almost certainly result in a misfire.
He recognized that the use of the trunks was, at best, a weak effort at shielding the van’s true cargo from prying eyes. At the same time, he didn’t want to have to hang curtains in the rear windows if it could be avoided. Doing so would almost certainly arouse the suspicion of the police officers checking vehicles in the vicinity of the motorcade’s route. The drive into the city, when detection was most likely, would be the most dangerous part of the operation. Once the van was parked, he would be able to detonate the bomb from the safety of his overwatch position if it appeared that the device was about to be discovered.
Even if the president managed to escape unscathed, a possibility that Will found highly unlikely, he knew with complete certainty that nothing would stop his creation from realizing its full potential.
Vanderveen turned away from the open rear doors of the van and sat back down at his worktable, gingerly stretching his hands out across the smooth wooden surface. His fingers were sore from the strain of packing the SEMTEX H into the steel compartments, but he ignored the pain and opened Shakib’s document to page 117. As he scanned the compact lines of text and accompanying diagrams, Will thought that whoever had laid out the security plans for this event had made some serious errors in judgment, errors he was more than happy to take advantage of.
He settled back in his chair and took a long sip of coffee, enjoying the gentle draft of cool air that found its way through the ancient crevices of the timber walls. There were things still to be done, but he had time.
He had all the time in the world.
CHAPTER 30
TYSON’S CORNER,HANOVER COUNTY
Looking up from the exhaustive piles of paperwork covering his temporary desk, Kealey gazed over the limited space of the CT watch center. It was packed wall-to-wall by more than 80 people who, if being judged only by their frantic gesticulations and elevated voices, might have been traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange following a merger between Microsoft and IBM.
He wanted to smile at the mental image that arrived with that thought, but was too tired and worried to see any humor in the comparison. They had been going nonstop for three days straight, but their efforts had yielded almost nothing in the way of new information. Seeking to narrow the search parameters even further, Ryan had argued that they should cut out Washington, D.C., itself, on the basis that it was too confined an area for Vanderveen to safely complete his preparations. Emily Susskind, the deputy director of the FBI, had shot down the idea without a moment’s hesitation.
Naomi had had a little more luck when she suggested that a general description of William Vanderveen should be released to the state police in Virginia and Maryland. The idea had been waved away at first: Director Landrieu argued that disclosure of another terrorist threat without definitive proof would only incite more panic, something that the president desperately wanted to avoid. Susskind had agreed with him, but Joshua McCabe had sided with Harper in support of the idea. Since the National Special Security Event designation gave the Secret Service overall control for the upcoming event, the decision was made to release the description, along with a carefully worded request for assistance in which the word terrorist did not appear once.
Nevertheless, the telephones and fax machines in the watch center had been going nonstop ever since, leads pouring in from the Area 17 office in Augusta, Division Four Headquarters in Wytheville, and the Maryland Barracks in Forestville, College Park, Easton, and Rockville. The tension in the overcrowded room increased in accordance with the workload, and as Kharmai watched yet another stack of paperwork gather in the receiving tray, she began to seriously question her own decision to involve the state troopers.
She felt a presence at her shoulder and looked up to see that Ryan was standing next to her. “Anything worth looking at?”
She shook her head and showed him the crumpled sheets of fax paper in her hands. “This stuff is worthless. If a Caucasian male between the ages of twenty and forty-five did anything to attract police attention on the eastern seaboard in the last three months, I probably have a file on him,” she said, gesturing at the pile of stacked reports. “You’d think they would know better than to waste our time with this kind of garbage.”
Kealey shrugged and said, “It’s not every day that the state police gets a request for assistance from the TTIC. We were careful with the wording in the description we sent out, but they know where it’s coming from. They’re going to assume there’s a terrorist threat, which makes their assistance valuable when the time comes to submit their budgets for the following year. They’re looking to help themselves first, Naomi.”
“Yeah, well, it would be nice if they could help us out a little bit in the process,” she mumbled.
Ryan grinned and rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. “Come on, I’ll help you look at it. If this stuff is as useless as you say it is, we’ll be done by twelve, and I’ll treat you to lunch. Sound good?”
A smile brightened her face for the first time that day. “It’s a deal.”
“What is this shit?”
Sergeant Richard Pittman looked up from the newest stack of paperwork on his desk and surveyed the room. “Where the hell did this come from? Jimmy?”
“Hell no, Sarge. That came straight from the lieutenant.”
“Yeah, straight to your desk,” Pittman grumbled. “Come on, man. Are you sure some of this isn’t yours?”
The other officer shook his head and grinned as he lumbered toward the open door. “I don’t see why you’re complaining anyway, Pitts. We got a two-hour briefing this afternoon that you get to miss out on. Everyone else is already over there. Whoever dropped that shit on your desk probably did you a favor.”
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Pittman mumbled. He was the only person left in the room, which he was grateful for, as it gave him the opportunity to issue a long string of profanities as he picked up the heavy stack of files and dumped them next to the fax machine. After eight years with the Virginia State Police, Rick Pittman had thought, on more than one occasion, that he was finally past these kinds of monotonous chores.
He flipped through the separate sheets of paper and saw that they all seemed to be going to the same place. I guess that’s something, he thought. There must be seventy-five different reports here. At least I won’t have to enter a different phone number for each one.
Pittman punched in the number listed at the top of the first page and began feeding the sheets of paper into the fax machine. Forty-five minutes and two cups of coffee later, he pushed through a Missing Person Report for NCIC Record Entry.
