The Beltway Assassin (2 page)

The affluent men and women who work in the within the highway encircling the American capital, better known as the Beltway, prefer to live as far as possible from the traffic and crime festering inside Washington, DC. The mansions and high-six-figure homes tucked into the pine forests of the Virginia countryside west of the Beltway are in high demand by the rich and powerful due to their safety, privacy, and comparatively modest Virginia taxes. Explosions that killed a neighbor and wrecked the better part of a block, however, weren’t part of the Tuesday morning routine.

Special Agent Greg Shelton flashed his FBI badge to the cop in front of a gap in crime scene tape. The cop did a cursory exam of the badge and Shelton’s face, then stepped aside.

Shelton pulled a badge resting from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and let it flop against his chest. The badge hung from a string of linked metal beads, identical to the chain that held his dog tags during his career as an army officer. He may have traded his combat fatigues and rifle for a suit and tie, but he still carried himself with the same sense of purpose and swagger he’d had while leading soldiers on the battlefields of Iraq.

Shattered glass creaked underfoot as he walked past a red Porsche, the hood and roof mangled from the blast wave that hammered everything within a quarter mile. Curtains fluttered through the jagged glass maws of broken windows. The million-dollar homes on the street looked like they belonged in the urban blight of Detroit, not one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America.

The epicenter of the blast was easy to find. A crater, ten feet across and a foot deep, scarred the driveway where Michael Bendis met his fate. The garage door to the Bendis home had collapsed inward, as if a giant had tried to bash his way in with a single punch. The home looked mangy from where parts of the brick facade had been blown away.

I never thought I’d see this in America
, Shelton thought. He’d had his share of near misses from IEDs, the roadside bombs that killed and wounded more soldiers than the insurgents’ bullets and rockets, and seen what explosions could do to men and materiel. The smell of desert air joined his memories of too many years in combat.

A half-dozen police cruises, light racks blazing, clustered around a high sided evidence collection van from Fairfax country. Patrolmen in uniform mingled with suited men and women. A constant murmur of instructions, reports, and radio transmissions emanated from the van and eclipsed the otherwise-grave silence of the neighborhood. Shelton picked out the FBI agents by their bleached-white shirts and monochrome ties. Those from other government agencies dared to exude more personality in their wardrobe.

“Shelton!” A jowly man sporting a ponderous belly and holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee waved to him from the outer edge of the scrum. Shelton lengthened his stride and made a beeline to the man.

“Are you Special Agent Burkowski?” Shelton asked.

“That’s me,” Burkowski said. “Hell of a mess, ain’t it?” He gestured to the bomb crater with his coffee cup.

“Looks like. My special agent in charge said you requested me for this investigation,” Shelton said.

“I asked for anyone with experience in Iraq or Afghanistan. Looks like you got the rose pinned on you.” Burkowski slurped his coffee and shrugged. “Got one victim, Michael Bendis, seventy-three, retired from civil service a while back and went contractor for some firm that pays entirely too much.”

Shelton looked down the block of blasted windows and damaged cars. An elderly woman in a bathrobe carried a dustpan full of broken glass; she strolled around the outside of her house and dumped the shards in a blue garbage can.

“Just one victim?” Shelton asked.

“Yup. Found most of him on the lawn. Found the rest on the neighbor’s roof,” Burkowski said. He tilted his head toward the blast crater and pushed past a handful of cops and agents in suits. Shelton followed in his ample wake.

Burkowski stopped at the end of the driveway; a yellow ribbon of crime scene tape fluttered between him and the crater. He sipped his coffee and sighed.

“Bombs going off in suburbia is a bit beyond what I’m used to. What the bureau’s used to. This ain’t small-fry stuff like we saw with the Unabomber and the occasional pipe bomb. You saw shit like this in Iraq, right? What’re we dealing with?”

Shelton took off his sunglasses and took in the crime scene. He looked over his shoulder at a bomb-disposal truck, where the technicians had the mangled base of a trash can on a hydraulic lift attached to the truck’s rear.

“When I was in Iraq, there were key parts of any IED we looked for: the explosive, trigger, initiator, power source,” Shelton said. “The bomb techs should know by now what kind of explosive the bomber used. If it’s a homemade, military, or commercial explosive, that’ll tell us how sophisticated the bomb maker’s skills are. The initiator sets off the main explosive and is almost always a blasting cap. If we can find any trace of it, we might have a lead. The trigger is connected to the initiator and sets off the explosive train. The power source…powers the trigger. Normally a battery from a motorcycle or a bunch of C or D batteries taped together.” Shelton’s eyes danced over the crime scene, taking in details.

“That’s great, junior. Real basic stuff from Quantico. You want to expound on that a bit?”

Shelton crossed his arms over his chest and ground a foot into the asphalt.

“Let’s assume this is a targeted killing. The bomber put an explosive in the garbage can and waited for the victim to get near the bomb. If it was a disturbance trigger, like a mercury switch or trip wire, it would have gone off as soon as he moved the garbage can from the side of the house.” He pointed at the crater centered on the driveway. “But the bomb goes off there. So we’re looking at a remote trigger, anything from a garage door opener to a cell phone.”

“So what?”

“So the bomber was here. He had line of site on the victim and pushed a button to set off the bomb. The neighborhood been canvassed yet?” Shelton turned around and scanned the neighborhood. At least a dozen houses and a wooded knoll a half mile away had sight lines to the crater.

Burkowski pulled a small notepad from a pocket and looked it over.

“We got a couple houses in either direction from the crime scene. All of the occupants said they didn’t hear or see anything suspicious before the giant goddamn explosion. Victim’s wife said she didn’t hear anything suspicious last night either. Ambulance took her to the hospital after she started complaining about chest pains,” the older agent said.

“The blast was what—four hours ago? And we haven’t done a full canvas?” Shelton asked. He’d graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico a few months ago, and the bureau’s standard procedures were still fresh in his mind.

“Nope. Things are at a bit of a standstill. Take a good look at the command vehicle, and I’ll impress
you
with some analysis. There are at least five different federal agencies in a dick-measuring contest to take over this investigation. There’s been a major bombing on American soil, and whoever gets the arrest on this case has their career made. It’ll get worse when the three-ring media circus gets going.” Burkowski finished his coffee with a grimace.

At the command truck, a knot of men in especially well-manicured suits jabbed fingers at each other and split their conversations between the rest of the knot and whoever was on the other end of their cell phone calls.

“I thought I was done with petty crap like this after I left the army,” Shelton said.

Burkowski snorted. “We may be a bit outside the Beltway, but we can’t escape DC politics. After the president’s last purge—excuse me, ‘highly encouraged early retirements’ of the bureau—everyone’s looking to suck up a bit more than usual.”

The newly elected President Benson had taken the unusual step of auditing the senior leaders of the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. A number of civil servants were found wanting and politely asked to retire. Their replacements, noted by more than one news media outlet but not by the major networks, where well known for supporting the president’s politics.

“Let’s get a look at the device before it goes away,” Shelton said and headed toward the bomb-disposal truck.

They found a fat man in black fatigues with a flat-bottomed beard, which had gone out of style in the mid-1800s. He was arguing with an FBI technician, who stood next to the remains of the blown-out garbage can.

“This needs to go to Charlottesville for exploitation,” the bearded man said.

“Your agency doesn’t have jurisdiction on this,” the technician said. “You can come look at the device at TEDAC when your paperwork clears.”

“You expect me to drive from Charlottesville to Quantico?” the bearded man said, looking like the technician had just suggested he perform an impossible anatomical act. The Terrorist Explosive Device and Analytic Center (TEDAC) was the FBI’s main forensic lab on the East Coast and a stone’s throw from the FBI Academy.

“You expect us to take this to your Podunk lab and drive from Quantico to Charlottesville just so you can tell us nothing? Piss off,” the technician said.

The bearded man went red. “What’s your name?”

“Last name: Jablowme. First name: Heywood,” the technician said.

The bearded man jotted the name down on a scrap of paper and stormed off.

The technician rolled his eyes and turned his attention to Shelton and Burkowski.

“Damn it, Sanders. Can’t you ever play nice?” Burkowski asked.

“Where’s the fun in that? Besides, Stupid Beard over there doesn’t have the lab to exploit this like we do,” Sanders said.

Shelton leaned over the mangled garbage can and saw gray and sandy material in the base of the can. “Incomplete detonation?” he asked.

“Yes. You’d think they’d have det. cord run through the whole main charge to ensure a complete detonation,” Sander said.

“What about the trigger? Initiator?”

Sanders licked his lips and glanced at Burkowski, who nodded quickly.

“That’s the thing. We went over the whole crime scene with a fine-tooth comb—no trigger, no wires of any kind. Binary explosive like this, ammonia nitrate and aluminum powder, won’t go boom-boom without some sort of a blasting cap,” Sander said, his voice low.

“This kind of bomb is hard to make?” Shelton asked.

“You kidding? I could make the explosives with fifty bucks and a trip to any drugstore,” Sander said. “I’m scratching my head over how he set it off. With an incomplete detonation like this, some part of the trigger should have survived.”

“This like anything you saw in Iraq?” Burkowski asked.

Shelton rubbed the stubble on his face and looked back at the wooded knoll in the distance. He remembered standing next to a bombed-out Humvee, the engine mangled like it had been through a meat grinder. They’d never found conclusive proof of how that Humvee was destroyed, but some elements of this bombing were similar.

“I’ve got a hunch. Follow me.”

****

Eric Ritter wrapped his hand around the push handle of a steel door and waited two seconds. He felt a slight tremor through the handle as the biometric readers approved his palm print and the magnetic locks disengaged with a snap.

Thermal sensors, pressure-plate flooring, and a host of cameras and biometric sensors warded the upper three stories of the commercial building where Eric Ritter worked ostensibly as an import/export executive for a shipping concern. In actuality, the CIA’s covert Caliban Program maintained the office as cover for Ritter and the rest of his team of operatives.

Reston, Virginia, was the ideal place for an office not wanting attention. The American government maintained buildings all along the Dulles Tech Corridor, running from the similarly named airport to the west all the way to Tyson’s Corner, where the toll road intersected with the Beltway. The locals joked that you could always spot the super-secret government buildings by the lack of business frontage, the presence of flag poles, and the suspiciously uniform security cameras on the roof, the type used only on federal government buildings.

Ritter’s office building had several legitimate companies on the lower floors and two floors of empty space between them. Prospective tenants were few and far between, since whoever owned the building advertised the space at rates nearly double the local comps.

He nodded to the security guard with an MP5 slung over his chest and walked through the hallway, passing closed office doors. The drone of air-conditioning mixed with the click of his heels on the linoleum floor. The office alternated between the activity level of a graveyard and that of a metro station; the bipolar nature was a by-product of the agents and analysts who inhabited the building. The Caliban Program focused on the world beyond America’s borders; as such the Reston office was little more than a launch pad for the program’s operatives.

Ritter stopped in front of a heavy wooden door and knocked. He looked up at the camera monitoring the doorway and gave a mock salute of two fingers to his brow. He winced as his arm dropped. The bullet wound he’d taken on a Russian merchant ship still hadn’t healed.

A buzzer sounded, and Ritter opened the door.

Shannon sat behind an expansive desk of lacquered maple, a mess of loose paper spilled across it. Her head of dark hair was bent toward her lap as she looked at something cradled in her hands. Her face, which before this day seemed impervious to the more than forty birthdays behind her, was lined and puffy.