eloquently pushing a range of programs and proposals for everything from urban renewal to radical shifts in American foreign policy. He was a man of influence. A man who inspired blind devotion in some and blind hatred in others.
And now Walter Steele had asked to be “invited” to speak at a National Press Club luncheon. The rumors sweeping the capital’s cocktail circuit said he planned to announce a bid for his party’s presidential nomination and failing that, he would announce backup plans to run as a third-party candidate. Political observers ranked him as a viable contender one capable of siphoning away several million votes from an administration that had only narrowly squeaked into office.
Preparations for the Reverend Steele’s visit began that morning.
At ten o’clock Sefer Halovic crossed Fourteenth Street with the light and ambled into the National Press Office building. He was dressed casually in jeans and a longsleeved flannel shirt, with only a bright green, reversible windbreaker as protection against the cold, blustery autumn day. He listed slightly under the weight of his equipment a full load of cabling and electronics gear. Black lettering spelled out “ECNS” across the back of the jacket. The same logo was repeated in smaller letters across the windbreaker’s upper right front, with the name “Krieger” printed underneath. The name matched the one on the press pass clipped to his shirt pocket.
Obtaining the pass had been child’s play. With the explosion in cable channels both in the United States and overseas, hundreds of reporters and television and radio technicians flooded the Washington, D.C., area especially right before any scheduled event that might generate headlines and airtime. And, politically correct or not, journalism was still a hard-drinking profession. Halovic smiled inside. Last night, it had taken Yassine only seconds to separate a beer-laden cameraman from his pass inside the noisy, jam-packed confines of a hotel bar. The young Palestinian scout’s fingers were deft the by-product of a boyhood spent living hand to-mouth in southern Lebanon refugee camps.
There should also be little risk in using the stolen pass. The cameraman might have reported his credential missing, but that would scarcely raise a serious official stir. Too many IDs were already adrift in this city of badges and cards for the police to zero in on one more among the missing. In any event, the pass now bore little resemblance to its original appearance thanks to a skilled forger on his special action team. It had been carefully doctored to show his new alias. A Polaroid photo displayed his new appearance. Barring close scrutiny by unusually suspicious security personnel, the alteration should not be noticed.
To change his looks, Halovic had dyed his blond hair a light brown and let his mustache grow out for a few days. He also wore a pair of tinted, blackframe glasses that hid his eyes.
Still, the Bosnian didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. That was why he had waited so long to enter the press club building and ride its small elevator up to the third floor. With less than two hours to go before the day’s luncheon, the corridors should be comfortably crowded. He followed several other technicians out of the elevator. Like him, they were draped in coils of cable and weighed down by tripods and other equipment.
As he had hoped, the building’s third floor looked even busier than usual. This was Halovic’s second visit to the press club. The first had come more than three weeks before, shortly after he and his team received General Taleh’s go code and began making the final scouting trips laid out in his operational plan.
The Bosnian joined the bustling crowds moving slowly through the lobby across a floor of heavily veined, polished tan marble. To his left was the Members Bar, dark-paneled and comfortable, with windows that overlooked the street. Even at this hour it was smoke-filled and noisy, already packed with reporters swapping drinks and stories.
He drifted right, heading for the entrance to the dining room.
A table blocked most of the entrance and a man in a suit sat behind it, checking badges. Suppressing a moment’s nervousness, Halovic joined the short line waiting to pass through the barrier. Intellectually, he knew that the odds were in his favor. Since the Reverend Steele was not yet an announced presidential candidate of any sort, the hard-faced men of the U.S. Secret Service were not here in great numbers. Certainly, the man behind the table seemed more a functionary than a watchdog.
He shuffled forward and, without unclipping it from his shirt, turned his press pass to face the checker. He was careful not to make eye contact. The man glanced up, focused on the picture for barely a second, then waved him through with a bored nod.
Hiding his sudden surge of relief, Halovic shouldered his gear and trudged down a short hallway into the main dining room. He had crossed the wire without tripping any alarms.
The dining hall itself was not as large as he had expected. While it was not shabby, it had a low ceiling and wasn’t nearly as ornate as the cavernous meeting rooms maintained by the area’s better hotels. Speakers appearing before the National Press Club were interested in exposure, not in decor. And the members themselves preferred to invest their limited resources in items closer to their hearts than fine furnishings, china, and silverware. Apparently, they reserved most of their funds for keeping the club bar well stocked.
Halovic briefly paused in the doorway to get his bearings. Toward the rear of the room, technicians swarmed over a tangle of cameras, video monitors, and boxes full of electronics gear. Waiters moved briskly among the round tables arrayed before a long head table, laying out white linen tablecloths and place settings. Everyone in view seemed busy. By 11:30 the room had to be ready for two hundred of Washington’s movers and shakers: working reporters, congressmen, administration officials, and influential lawyers and lobbyists.
He checked his own watch: 10:17 A.M. More than enough time. Sidling through the crowd in the rear, he studied the room layout with greater care. As expected, television cameras lined the back wall, stationed on an elevated platform so they had a clear shot of the head table and speaker’s podium. The floor underneath the platform was littered with dark-colored cables and brightly colored boxes that were labeled “CBS,” “CNN,” and a host of other networks, both large and — small. Behind the camera platform was a ten-foot-wide area where technicians crouched over video recorders and miniature TV monitors. Wearing headphones and mikes, they spoke constantly to their opposite numbers in other cities, fiddling with the connections and praying their satellite uplinks wouldn’t fritz just before they went live.
Halovic wended his way through the muttering crowds to a relatively clear spot and brought out his own gear. The VCR came first, and he found a power strip with an open socket. He was rewarded with a bright green power light. Next came several grey metal junction boxes and black cabling. Hooking one end of a cable to the VCR, he carefully screwed the jack in, then payed the cable out, walking toward the aisle in the center of the room.
Out of consideration for the luncheon guests and their feet, all of the electrical cables to the podium were being kept to one side of the center aisle, and Halovic fitted his own into the midst of the thick bundle. Almost immediately, he came to the end of the first twenty-foot segment. Most video cable came in longer lengths, but the Bosnian was ready with a junction box. The size and shape of a small shoe box, it was labeled “European Cable News Service” in neat white letters. There were jacks on all four sides. He connected the first piece of cable to one of the narrow ends and then unwound a second length before hooking it into the other side. He was careful to look for another green power light before continuing.
The next twenty feet of cable brought him halfway up the room. He stopped and attached a second junction box, identical to the first. He could feel his nerves twitching, sending out warning signals. Although he knew the room was swarming with technicians, he felt certain every eye was on him. He surreptitiously scanned the room, determined to bury his irrational fears. No one was watching. There was even another network engineer coming up behind him laying more wire.
When he reached the open-backed speaker’s podium with its nest of microphones, Halovic strung his cable around the edge and inside it. After a short pause to consider his options, he placed a third junction box inside the podium itself Two more segments led out from there to two more junction boxes one under each of the head table sections closest to the podium. More green power lights glowed.
In all of the confusion as technicians from more than a dozen competing news organisations worked frantically to set up their own equipment, nobody thought to ask Halovic why ECNS needed to wire up so much of the room.
Moving methodically now and with greater confidence, the Bosnian returned to the media area at the rear of the dining room, inspecting all the connections on the way. The boxes were in series, but he felt compelled to check and double-check his work. He would not get a second chance at this if something went wrong.
He scrambled onto the far end of the platform and began setting up a video camera on a collapsible tripod. It was a smaller camera and not as sophisticated as those of the other networks, but ECNS was supposed to be a new service one based in Eastern Europe. They’d only recently established themselves in the United States and
