ablaze. Other cars and vans further out were hit broadside by the shock wave and blown completely off the span, plummeting into the icy waters below. Everywhere the gasoline landed, fires erupted, fed by new fuel from ruptured automobile gas tanks. Within seconds, the jammed center of the Golden Gate Bridge was a roaring sea of flame.
The Marin Headlands, above the Golden Gate Half a mile away and five hundred feet above the bridge, Shahin tightened his grip on the car door handle, grimly holding on as Haydar Zadi took another hairpin turn too fast. The speeding Nissan skidded wildly, sliding across the centerline with its tires screeching.
The sky behind them caught fire, lit red and orange by an enormous explosion.
Zadi screamed, half blinded by the sudden glare off his rearview mirror. Still screaming, he spun the steering wheel around in a frantic effort to stay on the road. He turned the wrong way.
Moving at more than fifty miles an hour, the Nissan Sentra flew over the edge of the cliff, tumbling end over end down a sheer slope in an avalanche of dirt, rock, torn brush, and shredded metal.
Building 405 had started its life as part of the Benicia Army Arsenal. Since the Army closed its base back in the early sixties, the warehouse had changed hands more than a dozen times, moving from owner to owner and landlord to landlord in a dizzying, confusing procession. All of them had valued its sheer size and easy access to the freeway, railroad, and waterfront. None of them had valued Building 405 enough to spend much time or money on maintenance. From the outside, the place looked more like a ruin than a going concern a heap of flaking, cracked concrete walls covered by moss, rust stains from an old tin roof, and spray-painted graffiti.
FBI Special Agent Michael Flynn stopped at the entrance to the cavernous warehouse to watch his investigative team at work. More than a dozen agents were scattered throughout the building, poking and prying everywhere with gloved hands as they looked for evidence. Others were busy stringing yellow police tape around areas marked for closer inspection. Camera flashes went off in a rapid, uneven sequence as photographers recorded every aspect of their search.
Flynn followed every move intently, fighting hard to control the fury surging through him. The tall, grim-faced FBI agent had just come from the explosion site at the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-four hours after the bomb blast, firemen and forensics specialists were still prying charred bodies out of mangled cars strewn across the span. More than one hundred innocent men, women, and children were dead. Dozens more were critically injured all of them badly burned or maimed by flying chunks of steel. The bridge itself would be closed for days, both by the investigation and by the need to make sure the fires set by the tanker explosion hadn’t affected its structural integrity.
He shook his head. Over the years he’d seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of murder scenes. But he’d never seen anything like that tangled, twisted slaughterhouse on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Flynn wanted the bastards responsible for this massacre. He wanted them more than he’d wanted any murdering thug he’d hunted in his twenty-six years with the Bureau. His hands clenched into fists.
He looked up as his top aide broke off a hushed conversation with some of the other agents and hurried over. “What’ve you got for me, Tommy?”
“Plenty.” Special Agent Thomas Koenig nodded toward one of the work benches surrounded by yellow tape. “We found some cut strands of detonator wire over there. And the chemical sniffers are picking up definite traces of plastic explosive. There and all over this dump.”
Flynn grimaced. “So this was the bomb factory?”
“Yeah,” Koenig said flatly. “The way I figure it is this: They popped that truck driver out near the highway.” He pointed to the two massive ramps that led directly from the street into the building’s interior. “Then they drove the tanker right up one of those ramps, parked it, and pulled down those steel doors. After that, they had all the time in the world to wire it up for the big show.” He shrugged. “No muss. No fuss.”
cshit,’
“Exactly.” Koenig looked up at him closely. “Get anything besides a couple of John Doe stiffs out of that wrecked Sentra?”
Flynn nodded. Connecting the smashed-up Nissan they’d found at the bottom of the Marin cliffs with the bomb blast and dead CHP officer hadn’t required brilliant detective work, just common sense. “Weapons: a nine mil and a Czech machine pistol. They’re on the way to ballistics. Plus, we found a coil of wire and about a half-kilo block of plastic explosive in the trunk.”
Koenig whistled softly. “Curiouser and curiouser.” He frowned. “Think somebody else was out there yesterday morning cutting away a few loose ends?”
“Maybe.”
“Sir!” One of the agents manning their bank of laptop computers and secure phones waved him over. “A fax just came in from D.C. They’ve got positive IDs on both those bodies.”
Flynn arched a slate-grey eyebrow in surprise. That was damned quick work. Somebody was on the ball back at the Hoover Building after all.
He tore the paper straight out of the machine and scanned it rapidly. The Nissan’s driver was pegged as a man named Haydar Zadi, a legal resident alien and Iranian national. His eyes narrowed. Zadi had been on the FBI’s Watch List because of his reputed ties to Islamic radicals. No wonder they’d been able to identify him so quickly.
The biggest news was at the bottom of the fax. The other man they’d found wedged inside the crumpled Sentra was a bigger fish a much bigger fish. Though they didn’t have any fingerprints to match for a positive ID, the Bureau’s counterterrorist specialists were virtually certain the dead man was one Rashim Mahdi, alias Mir Ahrari, alias Mohammed Shahin.
“Son of a bitch.” Flynn ran his eyes down a long list of unsolved assassinations and bombings some in Europe, some in the Middle East. This Shahin character had been marked by a host of Western intelligence agencies as one of the HizbAllah’s key operational commanders. He looked up from the fax. “Put me through to the Director. Now.”
Outside the White House, the sun had long since set, bringing another cold, bray, and windy winter day to a dreary end. The streets around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were almost empty abandoned by the capital’s cadre of bureaucrats, politicians, and high-priced lawyers heading for plush suburban homes. Inside the executive mansion, however, staff aides, cabinet members, and uniformed military men still crowded the Oval Office.
Major General Sam Farrell knew it was considered an honor to be asked to offer advice to the President of the United States. Right now he was beginning to wish there had been some graceful way to decline that honor. He’d been invited to this high-level White House confab because he headed the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters controlling all U.S. military counterterrorist units, including the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. That made him one of the Pentagon’s top experts on terrorism. So far, though, Farrell, a sturdy six-footer with an open, friendly countenance, had been asked precisely two questions: Did he want coffee or a soda? And could he please move his chair over to make room for the Chief of Naval Operations?
To the general, the seating arrangements for this meeting reflected the current administration’s fundamental priorities and power structure. The President’s political gurus and media advisors filled the overstuffed chairs closest to his desk. Beyond them, the Director of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General sat in an awkward row, wedged together on a couch that was just a shade too small for all four of them. The loins Chiefs of Staff, Farrell, and a few other subordinate officers were furthest back, relegated to seats lining the far wall.
At last, the President looked up from a thick, red-tagged briefing book he’d been devouring while the discussion raged around him. There were shadows under his eyes. Even in normal times the nation’s chief executive often had trouble sleeping. Now his fatigue showed plainly. He fixed his gaze on the FBI Director. “You’re sure the Iranian government was directly involved in this attack on us? That this wasn’t just a couple of whacked-out crazies on a killing spree?”
Farrell shifted slightly in his chair, concealing his impatience. They’d already been over this same ground several times. The others around him didn’t seem fazed. Apparently, marathon talkfests were the rule in this administration, not the exception.
