it a few hours ago; there were some concerns about booby traps, especially after what happened in Hanover. The ATF guys that are taking it apart all say the same thing: simple, but efficient. He wired up a cell phone to the SEMTEX H, which was concealed in five steel trunks. By the way, you would have been screwed if you’d gone in through the back, Ryan. He had antihandling devices on the phone and two of the trunks.”
“But not the switch.”
“Not the switch,” Harper agreed. “He didn’t want to risk a premature explosion, so a wrong number to the phone wouldn’t have made a difference as long as there was no power going from the battery to the circuit. You said you heard the phone ring?”
“Yeah, it rang about two seconds after I flipped it.”
“That was Vanderveen trying to set it off. Those few seconds made all the difference, Ryan.”
Ryan felt a little bit sick over how close he had come to being wiped out, along with about eight city blocks. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “all I did was flip a switch.”
Harper was nodding slowly. “He needed to be able to activate it quickly, but he couldn’t exactly get in the cargo area and start rooting around in the middle of a busy city street. It was the best way for him to do it, and if it wasn’t for you showing up when you did, it would have worked.”
Ryan fell silent. He didn’t want to think about what had almost happened. There would be plenty of time for that later, but Naomi didn’t notice his hesitation, and she wasn’t finished: “What kind of damage are we talking about?”
The deputy director cleared his throat. “Well, there’s no definitive answer. I talked to Bateman — that’s the guy heading up the ATF task force, by the way — and he gave me some round numbers. We would have been looking at serious damage to every building in a four-block radius, plus some varying damage out to twelve blocks from ground zero. That would have included Freedom Plaza and Pershing Park. Estimates, and there is some dispute on this, are between 400 and 500 dead, plus anywhere up to 2,000 injured. The time of day was factored in to that as well; if it had been a few hours earlier, for example, the casualties would have been much lower.”
Ryan looked at his hands.
Director Andrews turned to stare out the window, ashen-faced. “My God.”
“What about the angle?” Ryan asked. “He was going after the motorcade, right?”
Harper nodded and said, “That’s right. There’s even more dispute over that question. He was definitely going after the motorcade, but it’s not clear if he would have been successful. Bateman thinks it would have worked, but the Bureau’s people are saying otherwise.”
The DCI broke in and added, “He stacked the odds in his favor by placing concrete blocks against the partition. That close to the actual device, it would have pushed most of the force of the blast directly out into 13th Street. I think he came closer than anyone wants to admit.”
Kharmai and Kealey fell silent at the candor of the remark, but Director Andrews was only getting started. He turned back from the window to appraise them carefully. “Needless to say, there’s going to be some serious fallout in the next few weeks. The first choice, of course, would have been to keep the whole thing quiet. After Senator Levy’s assassination and the Kennedy-Warren, the last thing we need are reports of a 3,000-pound bomb nearly taking out the president’s motorcade. If it had just been the evacuation on the waterfront, we could have explained it away. A few heads would have rolled, but we might have swept it under the mat.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. Vanderveen killed two people in his escape, including a Metro police officer. Both of them died in crowded areas, so there’s no way we can play it down. This is going to be headline news for the foreseeable future, so the president’s advisors, in all their wisdom, are trying to spin it into a positive thing, a major success for U.S. law enforcement. No one wants to call it what it really was.”
“A near disaster,” Ryan said.
Andrews nodded in agreement. “Exactly. But it’s out of our hands now, so if they want to play politics, we have no choice but to play along. Anyway, the president is looking to publicly slap some backs. That means you two. Especially you, Ryan.”
Kealey’s response was immediate and heartfelt. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” He saw the DCI’s reaction, checked himself, then said, “Excuse me, sir. I just don’t want to have anything to do with it. Besides, we’ve never operated that way, and the president knows it. I don’t want my face on television, and I don’t want to give any interviews. I just want to know what we’re doing to catch the bastard.”
Harper looked up and sighed heavily. “He didn’t get far in the Camry. It was found in an underground parking garage in Anacostia, and in the trunk, the body of a twenty-nine-year-old secretary.” Ryan swore and looked away, thinking about how close he had come to stopping Vanderveen. “He chose carefully; there were no cameras in the garage, no way to immediately determine what kind of car he switched to. The woman was missing her purse, so it took a while to track her down. They started with the neighboring buildings… When they found her employer, they got her name and a vehicle registration from the DMV. Then, of course, they found out that her car was missing. So there’s a nationwide APB out on her Camaro, but no one is especially hopeful. Just taking the woman’s ID gave Vanderveen a two-hour jump on Susskind’s people.” The deputy director paused to take a sip of coffee. Studying Harper’s weary expression, Ryan thought that the man looked exhausted, then realized that he probably didn’t look much different himself.
Harper was still talking. “Since this is all going public anyway, the president has given us free rein to track Vanderveen down. His name is already on the list of Most Wanted Terrorists, and we’ve gotten his face to passport control at every major airport in Western Europe, as well as Africa and Australia. He inadvertently helped us out with that… The picture on the Nichols’s driver’s license is probably less than two years old, which makes it much more recent than the army shots we were working with before. We’ve sent those updates to Interpol as well.”
“Vanderveen’s been tied to Iran and Al-Qaeda,” Ryan reminded them. “He has access to money, so he’s not exactly obliged to fly commercially. They might have arranged for a charter months ago, probably to some dinky little airfield out in the middle of nowhere.”
“You think he’s gone, Kealey?” asked the DCI.
“It would make sense, sir. If he stays here, he’s opening himself up to the biggest manhunt in the history of U.S. law enforcement. Besides, you know as well as I do that if he gets to Iran, we’re pretty much screwed. We have no assets there to speak of, unless something’s changed in the last twelve months.”
Harper sighed heavily. “Nothing’s changed.” He thought about it, then said, “He failed, though. If he’s on his way back to Tehran, he probably won’t be getting a very warm reception.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ryan said. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
The meeting adjourned five minutes later. Kealey and Harper walked side by side down the hall, neither finding much to say, each lost in his own private thoughts.
Harper, just to break the silence, said, “You’ll be getting a medal, you know. Naomi, too. Probably something pretty.”
Ryan shrugged halfheartedly but didn’t smile. “I don’t really care about that.” He glanced over at the other man quickly. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s just that I really don’t care. Besides, it’s not like I can show it to anyone anyway.”
Harper laughed a little at the way he had phrased it as they approached the elevators. “Not this time, Ryan. This is one of our few public accomplishments, our day in the sun. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.”
Kealey didn’t respond right away, once again lost in his own little world. Finally, he said, “You can mail it to me, John. I’m going home. Tonight.”
Harper found himself nodding in agreement. “Landrieu won’t be happy,” he observed. “He’s already pissed that you came here instead of getting debriefed back at Tyson’s Corner.”
“Fuck him,” Ryan said. “ Fuck him. He fought you on that ID thing, and I really needed it. I was ten seconds behind Vanderveen when those guys from HRT drew down on me. I don’t have anything against them… They were just doing their job. If I could have shown them something, though, we might have been able to catch up to him. Hell, I know we would have been able to.”
“He’s probably done, anyway,” Harper observed, steering the conversation back to the TTIC director. “Brenneman threw a lot of the blame for the senator’s death and the Kennedy-Warren at Landrieu, and a lot of it’s sticking.” He hesitated, then said, “I really did fight him on that, you know. He was going to shut you down the whole way, Ryan. I had to compromise.”
“I’m not blaming you, John. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just sick of people like Landrieu. There’s a thousand like him in Washington, and they all seem to hold the most dangerous jobs.”
