Seven Grams of Lead (36 page)

Hoagland looked on in bewilderment. “How did you find out?”

“Process of elimination, plus something somebody said.” Thornton wondered why he hadn’t figured it out sooner. The Bureau of Industry and Security, the Department of Commerce’s clandestine operations division, was one of just a handful of services with the budget to stage a show on the scale of Littlebird, and that sort of intel was their bailiwick.

He heard, or imagined, the voice of Musseridge over the radio. “In a fucking cowboy hat.”

“Listen, I may have to split any second,” he told Hoagland.

Hoagland moved behind the
Big Man
, acting more interested in the sculpture than in Thornton. Thornton followed, bringing them out of earshot of the other patrons.

Hoagland said, “Even though I knew they could have been eavesdropping when you and I spoke in Potomac, I hoped that you could help. The fact is, my firm is a DOC off-the-books operation. I signed on because I wanted to be of service to my country. And, bluntly, it helped that I stood to make twice what I was earning at Goldman. As the company grew, management brought in more analysts and traders, all legit. Most of them don’t know about the DOC—they’re what we call ‘cutouts.’ All are compensated well enough not to ask too many questions. Those of us who do know wonder whether we made a Faustian bargain. This morning, for instance, I had to go ‘service a dead drop’—is that the right phrase for hiding something in plain sight?”

“It depends,” Thornton said. Dead drops once were a staple of clandestine exchanges, but in modern times were a rarity due to the ease of covertly sharing information online. “What did you do?”

“I went to the Willard Hotel and stuck an envelope to the back of a radiator in a corner of the lobby. That’s when I got the text I thought was from Langlind. I figured his wanting to meet me was related to the envelope.”

Thornton thought better of explaining how he came to text Hoagland. “What was in the envelope?”

“I didn’t open it—I’ve learned it’s better not to know.”

“What was it that Catherine found out?”

“She happened to see satellite imagery of one of
our Commerce Department liaisons taken the night Leonid Sokolov was killed—the exact same imagery the FBI used two months earlier when looking for their ‘Russian.’ They either didn’t notice or didn’t think twice about a Commerce official in a yacht on Lake Michigan five miles away from the crime scene. But Catherine noticed. She also knew that the guy was a spook. And, most importantly, she hadn’t forgotten your theory that Sokolov’s killer had operated in Russia. She did some digging and found out that the guy had served in Moscow for a couple years. From there it was connect-the-dots.”

Patrons came and went, but no law enforcement.

“So who’s the guy?” Thornton asked casually.

“Peter Canning.”

No bells. “Is he the one who sent you to the Willard Hotel?”

“Yes. Why?”

An unnaturally quick motion registered in Thornton’s peripheral vision. He peered over his shoulder in time to see a uniformed man dart across the opening of the corridor. The uniform was similar to the security guards’, but a darker blue. And Thornton heard the jangle of cuffs.

“I think I can help after all,” he said.

The capitol police
SECURITY CAM FACIAL RECOGNITION SOFTWARE REGISTERED A COLD HIT AT THE HIRSHHORN ART MUSEUM
…
While leading two D.C. plainclothes FBI agents and fourteen uniformed policemen and women to the Mueck corridor, Musseridge mentally composed the FD-302 he would type up later.
IN THE COURSE OF APPREHENDING THE SUSPECT
,
THE WRITER HAD NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO DISCHARGE HIS WEAPON
.

And there he was, in the cowboy hat, one of six patrons checking out a sculpture of a huge naked guy. Ideally, in this situation, Musseridge got as close as possible to a suspect without his knowing. But the long corridor here precluded sneaking up. He signaled for
the D.C. Metro cops to handle the crowd. Then he gestured for a Capitol cop to hand over his megaphone.

Flicking it on, Musseridge said into it, “Mr. Thornton, this is the FBI. Please put your hands in the air and turn around nice and slow.” The order resounded against the bare walls.

The guy who turned around looked a little like Thornton, but he was leaner, with sharper features and more polish. He resembled Peretti’s husband, the hedge fund guy, Musseridge thought. Of course that guy didn’t wear a cowboy hat or have a fucking mullet.

Turning to the Capitol cop, Musseridge said, “That facial recognition software of yours needs to be shit-canned.”

Thornton climbed from the top of the radiator in the empty men’s room, hoisting himself through the window. When the tour group in the courtyard sculpture garden shifted its attention to a Calder, he gathered up the tails of Hoagland’s trench coat and let go, a ten-foot drop. He landed on mercifully soft grass.

Fighting the urge to sprint, he ambled out of the courtyard and back into the building, in time to see the phalanx of law enforcement officers streaming down the Mueck corridor.

He passed through the main exit, turning onto Independence. The Willard Hotel was a little more than a mile away, and it seemed likely to him that the
package in the lobby there had something to do with Sokolov’s E-bomb. It would be odd if it didn’t. A connection to one Sokolov or the other had cropped up at every stage of what had amounted to his investigation. Beating the intended recipient to the envelope offered a singular chance not only to obtain tangible evidence, but also to prevent thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of additional deaths.

He found Hoagland’s Volvo station wagon two blocks from the Hirshhorn. As he clicked Hoagland’s remote and opened the doors, a police cruiser rolled up the block. Fighting the instinct to hurry, Thornton lowered himself onto the driver’s seat.

He drove the Volvo up 9th to Pennsylvania, where he turned left at the boxy concrete Hoover Building, the headquarters of the FBI. Of all places. He continued driving, right beneath the Bureau’s nose.

A few blocks later, he found a parking spot in front of Pershing Park, just across from the Willard Hotel. The twelve-story beaux arts palace had been a hive of activity for well over a century—its lobby largely responsible for the term
lobbyist
—making it a textbook dead drop location.

Walking across Pennsylvania Avenue, Thornton felt exposed. Other than Hoagland’s trench coat, his disguise now consisted only of a pair of tortoiseshell glasses he’d found in the Volvo. The lenses distorted his vision to the extent that he couldn’t be sure whether it was his imagination or not that the doorman was staring at him.

He entered the soaring lobby, the ornate ceiling and its plethora of crystal chandeliers supported by six massive Ionic columns. Guests wandered in and out of shops and restaurants.

Two of the giant room’s four corners had radiators, waist-high units with clawed feet, every last cast-iron pipe adorned with as many flourishes as could fit. Behind the second radiator he checked, Thornton found where the envelope had been: Now there was just a torn corner of a manila envelope held against the back of a pipe by a magnet the size of a silver dollar. He suspected the magnet was made from an alloy of iron, boron, and rare-earth neodymium, explaining why the scrap of paper remained. Such magnets were popular for dead drops because the document couldn’t be loosed by a gale-force wind.

Thornton used both hands and all his strength to pry the magnet free, absorbing a lightning bolt of pain to his bruised rib cage. To avoid drawing the attention of the pair of men in kaftans and kaffiyehs who were chatting on the sofa six feet away, he looked away, pretending to be captivated by something outside the window. Then, in fact, he was truly captivated. A swarthy young man was hurrying up the sidewalk, sliding on a pair of sunglasses although the hotel’s shadow made the block nearly dark. He wore a black overcoat and held a manila envelope under his arm.

“Excuse me, sir,”
said the doorman with a smile suggesting that he held Thornton in high esteem, or, more likely, he’d recognized him from a photograph e-blasted around town by the FBI.

Before the man could say any more, Thornton, pretending not to have heard him, took several strides toward the side exit.

“Sir?”

Thornton kept on toward the door. Perhaps not the best play, he thought. Sidestepping a luggage cart, he shoved his way through the revolving door and onto the sidewalk. Spotting the man in the black overcoat near the intersection, Thornton accelerated.

The man took a hasty left onto F Street. By the time Thornton turned the corner, the guy was gone,
too quickly to have been picked up or to have gotten into a parked car. Into a store? No, down the ramp to the Willard’s underground parking garage: Thornton caught sight of his overcoat.

Adrenaline acted like rocket fuel. Thornton flew past an office furniture store and onto the ramp leading down to the garage. It was so dark that he failed to discern the black overcoat, not until the man appeared in front of him, pointing a polymer Beretta Storm with steel inserts. It was a lightweight gun, yet capable of blowing sizable holes in someone.

Thornton held up his hands and said, “It’s okay. I’m with Canning. You forgot this.” He turned his left hand to reveal the neodymium magnet. The disk flashed pink in the wash of the illuminated exit sign.

“Bullshit, you the journalist,” said the man, his accent Middle Eastern, heavy on the vowels. Maybe Iraqi or Kuwaiti—Thornton couldn’t tell.

The guy shot a quick look at the entrance, then another to the base of the ramp. No one was coming. He raised the Beretta to within inches of Thornton’s chest.

“Wait, there’s something else you need to know,” Thornton said, inching his hand toward the Beretta.

The magnet rose out of his palm, clicked against the steel barrel, and stuck there—just as he’d hoped. If the guy pulled the trigger now, Thornton thought, he risked a KB—shooter shorthand for
kaboom
: A bullet traveling near the speed of sound with nowhere to go could cause the barrel to explode.

The gunman seemed aware of the danger. He backed away, trying to pry the disk off the muzzle. Thornton lunged, hammering his right shoulder into the man’s stomach, knocking him backward, yanking his legs from beneath him. The rugby coach who’d taught Thornton the “dump tackle” would have been proud. The back of the gunman’s head struck the sidewalk. Thornton landed on top of him, then rolled left, snaring the gun with no resistance from its owner.

Thornton sprang to his knees, then banged the gun against the curb, knocking off the magnet. Then he plunged the muzzle into the guy’s belly. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Mossad,” the guy said, too quickly.

“Okay, so we can rule out Mossad. One more wrong answer and I’m going to find out if it’s true that a bullet can pass through the spleen—” Thornton stopped short, noting the manila envelope lying on the cement.

As he plucked it up, a cell phone protruded from the hole at the corner. He suspected it was a remote detonator. In which case, was an E-bomb close by?

“Where’s the bomb?” he asked.

The guy shook his head. “Fuck you.”

“He had to have gone this way,” came a familiar voice.

Thornton glanced over his shoulder and, through the glare from F Street, made out the Willard doorman leading two policemen along the sidewalk.

Turning back to the man lying beside him, Thornton
whispered, “There’s a key difference between me and them: After you tell me where the E-bomb is, I’ll let you go.”

The man groaned. “How would I know where it is?”

Which suggested that there was indeed an E-bomb. But a foot soldier servicing a dead drop probably wouldn’t be told the weapon’s whereabouts.

Glancing at the angled mirror atop the ramp, Thornton saw the doorman and policemen hurrying past. As he turned back to his captive, a black Mercedes sedan sped down the ramp. He saw a gun poking out from the driver’s window.

Thornton dove for the pavement, placing his captive between himself and the gun. The gun flashed and a blast shook the tunnel. The bullet snapped the foot soldier’s head sideways, apparently for good.

The Mercedes braked a few feet from Thornton. The driver leaned out the window for another shot, revealing a bull neck and bald head. Thornton aimed the slain foot soldier’s Beretta and fired three times, pausing only when the Mercedes began to roll forward. It picked up speed, heading straight ahead when the ramp turned, the hood impacting the wall with an ominous thud. The horn went off, resounding in the tunnel. Thornton recognized the rear license plate’s distinctive red, white, and blue stripes—diplomatic tag issued to a foreign mission or embassy by the State Department. The two-letter prefix,
which indicated the country, was DM—Israel. As if a Mossad operative would be foolish enough to show up in an embassy car, Thornton thought.

Figuring that he would learn the impostors’ true identities soon enough, he gathered up the manila envelope and sprinted for F Street. Finding it clear, he jogged toward 14th before ducking into the office supply store. Reflected in the glass door, he saw the doorman and two policemen doubling back from the far corner.

“Can I help you?” asked a saleswoman.

Over her shoulder, Thornton took in a row of ergonomic desk chairs lining the back wall. He asked, “Do you have the kind of desk chair that’s good for your back?”

She smiled. “Right this way.” She turned toward the back of the store.

He went the opposite way, exiting onto F Street as the doorman and cops turned into the parking garage. He ran to the corner and peered around, spotting a smattering of cars and pedestrians on 14th Street, but no cops. He joined the pedestrian traffic to Pennsylvania Avenue. When no one tried to stop him there, he stepped onto the crosswalk and, within seconds, was in Hoagland’s station wagon, sliding forward in the driver’s seat so that his head was below the window. He tore open the manila envelope to study the cell phone.