Ronnie Powell interrupted his reverie. “Tony, I can’t find the keys to the forklift.”
Annoyed, Mason walked over and checked the ignition, which was empty. “Fuckin’… They’re probably up in the office.”
“I’ll get ’em,” the other man intoned.
“Don’t worry about it. Just finish this shit,” Mason replied, pointing to the unsecured cases. “I’ll get ’em myself.”
Powell shrugged and reached for his end of another case as Mason started up the stairs to the second floor, the iron steps heaving beneath his heavy frame.
Inside the CP, Ryan Kealey was holding a warm Coke and staring at the wall opposite the bank of monitors. Taped to the peeling wallpaper were blurry blueprints for the warehouse on Duke Street, as well as hand-drawn maps indicating possible insertion points for the D.C. SWAT teams. As he went over the diagrams, Kealey thought that raiding the building was, at best, a risky proposition. Normally, he would have accounted for the fact that he had only arrived a few minutes earlier, but in this case, the assault teams were no better off. They’d only been pulling surveillance for two days, and though they were set up in the garage on the ground floor, Kealey didn’t think they would have had time to go through the usual exhaustive preparations. In other words, the raiders were hardly prepared for what lay ahead.
According to the blueprints, the exterior walls of the warehouse were constructed of reinforced cement, and the doors were steel, two inches thick, embedded in stout frames of the same material. Besides the roll-up vehicular entrance, there were only two points of entry on the south side of the building, which opened up onto Duke Street, and no way in from the back. To make matters worse, the assaulters would have to cross fifty feet of open ground before they could even get to the doors, which would have to be breached with explosives, causing yet another dangerous delay. The place was a veritable fortress, ideally equipped for a defensive stand.
Kealey turned away from the diagram and surveyed the cramped room. Harper was standing a few feet away, talking to someone on his cell phone, as was Samantha Crane. Matt Foster, drifting nearby, caught Kealey’s eye and walked over. He had removed his suit jacket, revealing a starched white shirt and a hand-tooled leather shoulder holster. The grip of his service weapon poked out from beneath his left arm.
Foster nodded toward the blueprints and said, “It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?”
Kealey started, surprised to hear the other man say what he had just been thinking. “Yeah, as a matter of fact. I don’t know how you plan on pulling it off.”
“Well, it’s not really up to us, you know. We had some concerns as well, but Sam was overruled.”
Sam? What was the deal between these two? “I thought she was in charge.”
“It kind of looks that way,” Foster agreed. “See that guy over there?”
Kealey followed the other man’s gaze to a slight, balding man in an off-the-rack, lightweight linen suit. The older man was sandwiched between two subordinates, both of whom were taller, better dressed, and far more representative of the typical agent.
“That’s Craig Harrington, the assistant director in charge for the Washington field office,” Foster explained. “Technically, he’s the guy running things, but he’s got a lot on his plate, so he handed it off to Sam. The WFO called her in a few days ago, when they first got a line on Mason. She was running the investigation down in New York, and she’s done some good work with the JTTF in Dallas, so they figured she was best equipped to deal with it.”
JTTF stood for Joint Terrorist Task Force. The acronym referred to a handful of agents in each of the Bureau’s fifty-six national field offices who worked with local law enforcement, as well as nearby ATF and DEA offices, to combat terrorist activity. Kealey wasn’t at all surprised that Crane had been called up from New York to organize the arrest, as the Bureau was much more flexible than local law enforcement when it came to matters of jurisdiction. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, agents from half a dozen field offices around the country had been brought in to assist with the investigation. The same thing had transpired at Ruby Ridge, though just about everyone at the Bureau would prefer to forget all about that particular incident.
“So how do you fit in?”
Foster grinned, suddenly looking all of twelve. “Sam needed a gopher, so she asked me to tag along. That about sums up my role in this little drama.”
Kealey nodded again, deciding that he might have judged this young agent a little harshly. Apart from the overly casual references to Samantha Crane, he seemed to know his place. Belatedly, Kealey realized that he might have an ally here.
“Listen, Agent Foster. I’m going to tell you something in the hopes that you’ll pass it along. See this open area here?” He pointed on the diagram to the parking area just south of the warehouse. “The brick wall running next to the road might shield their vehicles on the approach, but once they dismount, the assault teams are going to be completely exposed for at least fifty feet. I’m sure you have sniper support, but-”
Kealey stopped in mid-speech when he saw that the other man was shaking his head. “They’re not going in that way,” Foster explained. He pointed to spots on the map just east and west of the warehouse. “You can’t see it from this layout, but there are chain-link fences just outside the building. The boys from D.C. SWAT cut gaps in the fence last night… All they have to do is push through and hug the face of the building. That way, the shooters across the street can cover the assault teams and the warehouse. Mason has cameras, of course, but we’ve arranged to cut power just before our guys go in. They’ve already set up a hard perimeter, so we should have it covered.”
Kealey nodded. The plan didn’t sound like much, especially coming from Foster, but it was better than the alternative. Still, he knew that the raid carried a great number of risks. First and foremost — at least in his mind — was the danger that Mason might not survive. He was the only link between Arshad Kassem and the Iraqi insurgency, and Kealey wanted to know where the weapons were coming from. The file he’d read a few minutes earlier had cast some serious aspersions on Anthony Mason’s ability to run a successful criminal enterprise, and Kealey was no longer sure that the trail stopped with the American-born arms broker.
Looking around the room once more, his gaze fell on Samantha Crane, whose eyes were fixed on the bank of monitors. She was anxiously chewing on a fingernail, her left arm wrapped around her waist in a curious way.
“Is she going to be all right?”
Foster glanced across the room. “Yeah, she’s good under pressure.”
Kealey nodded again but noticed that the other man’s words didn’t carry the same weight of confidence as they had during the first half of the conversation.
CHAPTER 15
PARIS, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
It was just after 8:00 PM as the last of the 82 passengers on Lufthansa Flight 1822 trudged into the glass and concrete expanse of Terminal 2F, weighed down by the standard melange of discarded coats, carry-on bags, and sleeping infants. For the most part, the travelers moving toward the main building looked as tired as they felt, which was not surprising, as most had merely connected in Frankfurt. Essentially, their journey had begun eight hours earlier in Istanbul’s Ataturk International, only to end here, on the northeastern fringe of the French capital. As one of two main hubs in the Paris area, Charles de Gaulle International was sometimes referred to as “Roissy Airport” by the abrupt locals, although the second part of this title was occasionally dropped altogether.
The last passenger to step out of the Jetway moved with a studied ease and appeared remarkably well rested, which was ironic, as his journey had been considerably longer than that of the other passengers. After leaving Tartus, Will Vanderveen had driven a Peugeot back to Lattakia, where he’d dumped the vehicle and caught the Qadmous bus to Aleppo, essentially retracing his steps. From there, he’d purchased a bus ticket to Istanbul. While the ticket was remarkably inexpensive, the equivalent of twenty dollars, the modest sum was not the reason for his circuitous route. Of far more importance was the fact that the bus crossed into Turkey via the Bab al-Hawa border station, the most congested — and, therefore, the least demanding in terms of security — of all four border checkpoints. His French passport had been expertly crafted two months earlier by an embittered former department head with the DGSE, the French external security service. The gold-embossed burgundy booklet — which contained the appropriate entry stamp acquired at Damascus Airport — had been enough to satisfy the overworked Turkish
