The Beltway Assassin (10 page)

Irene had a simple cover to get her into the building and bug the computer systems. She could meet any prying questions with the stony nature she’d picked up during an analyst exchange with the NSA. The National Security Agency was so tight lipped about almost everything that the rest of the intelligence community joked that the trigraph stood for Never Say Anything. Pointed questions from counterintelligence officers looking for her weren’t something she could handle.

“‘You won’t get caught,’ they said. ‘It’ll be fun,’ they said,” she murmured.

A stall door slammed shut, and Irene jumped like she’d been shocked. Her toothbrush went flying and rolled under the sink. She gathered up her toiletry pouch and abandoned the toothbrush.

The ladies’ room was a few yards from the floor’s server room, the door of which was open. As Irene passed by, she looked inside from the corner of her eye. The HVAC system that serviced the servers bathed her in cold air, eliciting goose bumps from her exposed flesh. A pair of men had a laptop hooked into the server, their conversation lost to the thrum of air-conditioning.

Irene swallowed hard, tension turning her spine to steel as she tried to continue down the hallway. Part of her wanted to scream her guilt and just get the whole thing over with.

She paused at the windows and looked at the SWAT team at the entrance. They’d stayed at the entrance, waiting like baited bears for the call to action. Several of them wore black ballistic masks. Irene wasn’t sure whether the look they were going for was supposed to be Darth Vader or Jason from Friday the 13th killer. FBI agents, in their blue jackets with yellow lettering, kept their own counsel away from the SWAT team.

Elevator doors opened, and three men in identical gray suits, practically in lockstep in purpose, made a beeline for her cubicle farm. Irene, her mind racing in panic, slipped into the open elevator and jabbed the
close
button. The micro USB in her pocket felt like a lead brick on her consciousness. Why the hell was she spying on Americans anyway?

The door closed, and the elevator ascended without her input. The elevator looked enough like a cell that Irene’s spirits sank to a nadir. Why prolong the inevitable? She decided to give herself up to the next investigator she saw.

The elevator stopped, and a rotund woman with permed hair entered. She carried an evidence box full of wires and wrecked electronic parts. She gave Irene an odd look as the doors started to close.

The emergency beacon on the key ring in Irene’s toiletry bag vibrated with a text message from someone nearby. Irene’s foot shot out and stopped the doors before they closed.

“Long day,” Irene said to the woman. Not seeing anyone else in the corridor, she ducked into the stairwell. She snapped the plastic case off the emergency beacon; a tiny LCD strip displayed a banner message on repeat.

IM COMING FOR YOU. HIDE AND DO NOT MOVE UNTIL I GET TO YOU. LIGHTS OUT IN TWO MINUTES-ER

Irene felt a weight lift from her shoulders. Maybe a prison sentence wasn’t in her future.

****

Ritter lay on the frozen ground; a green space blanket between him and the earth kept his body heat inside him and the mud off him. Not that the mud bothered him, but he needed to look like any other FBI employee in the next couple of minutes. The TEDAC building, twenty yards ahead of him, glowed in the night—every window lit and silhouettes moving within.

“Tony, you ready?” Ritter said, his finger on the throat mic.

“I can guarantee eight minutes before the base auxiliary power kicks in. She’s on the top floor, I think. Something just snagged the signal from me and let it go,” Tony said through Ritter’s earpiece.

Ritter rose to a crouch and threw a backpack over his shoulder. He ran to the building; the last few feet were exposed grass. He dropped the pack and glanced through the window: an empty conference room with a door open to the corridor beyond. Other than the reinforced blast glass covering the window, the location was perfect.

He pulled out an aerosol can and sprayed dark tan foam along the window frame. A remote detonator went into the settled foam. Once initiated, the foam would blow the window from the frame, giving Ritter a way into the building that didn’t involve direct confrontation with the SWAT team lounging around the entrance.

As for the SWAT team, Ritter had something that might keep them out of the way long enough to get Irene out of the building. From his pack he put a remote-control (RC) car, a trio of steel-gray cylinders where the toy chassis should have been, on the ground. He flipped a switch on the back of the device, and a night-vision camera feed popped up on his smartphone.

“Say when,” Tony said.

Ritter fiddled with the remote control and the smartphone, trying to handle both at the same time.

He pressed his chin against his chest to activate his throat mic. “Why do I need three hands to do this?”

“Why don’t you quit complaining about the marvel of technology I made for you?” Tony snapped.

Ritter put the smartphone on the ground and drove Sparky forward, using the camera feed to guide him as the device went around the corner. The SWAT van and a pair of local security cruisers were ahead. He’d have to get Sparky around a few curbs, but the route looked clear. Sparky accelerated with an electric whine.

“Eric?” Tony’s voice had a hint of trepidation. “Are you mad at me? I didn’t mean to get all pissy.”

Sparky loped around a curb and stopped under a cruiser.

“Eric?”

“Get ready to push the button,” Ritter said.

****

Burkowski lounged against the side of the SWAT van and checked on the Steelers game on his phone. He had fifty bucks on the spread, and the score didn’t look like it would get any better in the last two minutes of play.

“Goddamn Broncos,” Burkowski said.

A whining sound took his attention away from his phone. He leaped back as an RC car shot out from under a cruiser and zipped past him. It skidded to a halt a couple of yards from the SWAT van.

Two metal cylinder’s popped out from the side of the RC car. Yellow smoke burst from both as they rolled across the asphalt and went straight toward Burkowski. A hint of the smoke burned Burkowski’s eyes. He tried to shout a warning but got a lungful of the smoke for his trouble. Decades had past since last he’d breathed tear gas during Marine basic training, but that distant experience was enough to tell him he’d just been hit with it.

The power to the buildings around him cut off. The whirling lights of the idling cruisers and SWAT van whirled through the fog of tear gas. Burkowski stumbled back from the noxious gas and, unfortunately for him, got a great look at what happened next.

The remaining cylinder on the RC car, a flash-bang grenade, lived up to its billing when Ritter set it off. The bang hit Burkowski and the SWAT team with 150 decibels, enough to knock their inner ears for a loop and cause deafness for hours afterward. The flash, equivalent to three million matches struck to life in an instant, hit Burkowski’s eyes like twin bolts of lightning. He stumbled back and tripped over a parking median. He fell on the grass and pawed at his ears and eyes, unsure which needed the reassuring pressure the most.

His world was darkness and a keening whine; his nose and throat burned from the tear gas, and snot poured down his face. He rolled onto his hands and knees, and crawled, heedless of whether he was crawling deeper into the cloud of gas or away from it. What little progress he made stopped when his head collided with a car bumper.

Burkowski collapsed, his chest heaving in the clean air. Not for the first time, he wished he’d decided to be an accountant instead of a cop, like his mother had wanted.

****

Ritter had triggered the breaching charge around the window nearly simultaneously with the flash bang in the parking lot. He threw a Kevlar blanket over the glass shards and concrete rubble of what remained of the window and climbed into the building.

The power was out but not for long. The pale-yellow halo of emergency lights gave scant illumination to the hallway. Ritter slid what looked like a pair of sports sunglasses over his eyes and double-tapped the frames. The built-in night vision lenses activated, showing him a world in green scale. A ski mask went over his face; it wouldn’t serve to be recognized now or identified later.

He ran from the room and tore up the stairwell, running up and down the center of the building. While the FBI analysts weren’t soldiers, a respect for a chain of command still existed within the organization, the result of decades of hiring former servicemen and servicewomen for the agency. If the FBI personnel held to his expectation, they’d hunker down in their offices after that blast until someone told them to move. Ritter’s plan was to find Irene and spirit her out before the stairwell filled with anyone running for the doors.

He took the stairs two at a time, his cracked ribs making him pay for every breath. Five flights of pain until he reached Irene.

****

When the lights cut out, Irene ducked into an evidence holding room. Fire-safety regulations demanded that power outages automatically unlocked all the magnetically sealed doors. Irene felt her way along a bank of lockers until she found one that was unlocked. Her slight figure barely fit into the case of cold metal.

A crash of broken glass and a stream of expletives came from the darkness. Whoever was running the evidence locker had just made a mess. Irene sank down on her haunches and held her knees against her chest. The keychain with the emergency beacon was still in her hand. She squeezed it, willing Ritter to hurry up and find her.

The door she’d used opened up. Irene’s heart skipped a beat. She felt a flutter of hope and reached out to the locker, ready to push it open and call for Ritter.

A flashlight burst into life and swept over the room. Irene heard two sets of footsteps, leather-soled shoes clicking on the linoleum floor.

“Who’s there?” came from deep in the darkness; the voice was reedy with fear.

“Office of Professional Responsibility. Have you seen an Asian female? Khaki pants and blue top?” a deep voice said.

“How am I supposed to see anyone if I can’t see a goddamn thing? What the hell happened out there?” the first voice said.

Two shapes moved past Irene’s hideout; their lone flashlight sent rays of light through the gaps in the metal.

“The tracker says she’s up here,” a voice said.

“She’s what—a hundred pounds soaking wet?” a second, deeper voice said. Knuckles rapped against another locker down the line, and Irene fought to keep from hyperventilating.

The flashlight went up on a shelf, and Irene heard the
click-clack
of a handgun chambering a round. Lockers slammed open, the sound growing closer to her one at a time. A sob escaped her lips as the locker next to her creaked open. There was a pause, and the door concealing her flew open.

Zike, the light running over his pockmarked face like he was in some cheap horror movie, leered at her. The other man, his face lost in the glare of the light, had a gun in his hand.

“We’re going to have fun with this one,” Zike said and reached for her.

“Not tonight,” came the voice from the darkness.

****

Ritter clicked off the flashlight and attacked. The agent with the gun was the biggest threat and his first target. With no lights on, Ritter’s night-vision lenses were a tremendous boon to the fight. He ducked under the line of fire as his first target swung toward him; then he chopped his forearm against the wrists of his target.

There was a snap of the impact and a yelp from the gunman. Ritter stepped toward his target and smashed an elbow against his jaw. The man’s head snapped back with the click of teeth smashing together, and he hit the ground like a sack of meat.

Ritter whirled around just in time to catch Zike’s tackle against his already-broken ribs. The hairline fractures he’d suffered before erupted as fault lines of pain in his chest. They bounced off the evidence lockers and went to the ground in a heap.

Whoever he was fighting, Ritter knew he was against a professional. The key to any blackout fight was to get a grasp of your opponent and never, ever let go. Rough hands grabbed his shirt and jerked him in the air, then slammed his head against the lockers with a clang. Ritter’s vision swam, and he managed to land a weak punch against Zike’s head.

Ritter unsnapped his combat knife and pulled it from the sheath on his lower back with a hiss of steel on leather. He wouldn’t kill this man, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hurt him. Ritter swung the spiked pommel at his opponent’s face.

Zike’s forearm blocked the blow and his hand came down to grasp Ritter’s wrist. Zike’s fist slammed into Ritter’s forearm, knocking the blade loose from nerveless fingers.

Zike hammered a blow against Ritter’s temple, sending a flash of white across his eyes. Ritter lashed out with his free hand and clipped Zike’s chin. Feeling came back to the hand in Zike’s grasp, and he wrenched it free.

Losing his weapon opened a new option to Ritter. There was a good reason professional fighters didn’t wear three-piece suits to a match. Ritter grabbed Zike’s jacket collar in a cross-armed grip and pulled it against his carotid arteries. Ritter kicked a leg into Zike’s crotch and used the shock of the blow and the momentum as a lever to roll him onto his back.