The Beltway Assassin (6 page)

“Greg, I don’t want…This guy is dangerous, right? Maybe you should step away from this,” she said.

“Ritter or the bomber?”

“Yes.”

Shelton leaned over and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Don’t worry, baby. I’ve got this. We have a piece of evidence at the forensics lab right now. We should have a good lead by morning.” The air-conditioning kicked on, and a curl of hot air stroked Shelton’s face.

“They finally fixed that vent?” Shelton asked. The lousy HVAC system was on the long list of repairs for their town house.

“Yeah, guy showed up today out of the blue.”

“Daddy?” a squeaky voice said from behind them.

Their youngest, Caroline, stood in the doorway, a limp, gray stuffed rabbit in the crook of her arm. Caroline rubbed her eyes, a pout on her lips.

“Hey, sweetie.” Shelton swept up his daughter and carried her back to her room.

“Mr. Bubbles is scared,” Caroline said.

“Daddy’s home. No reason to be scared anymore. Right, Mr. Bubbles?” Shelton said. He pushed the door open to his girls’ room. The other two girls were still asleep under their blankets. A lambent glow from the dark stickers of stars and planets illuminated Caroline’s empty bed.

“Now, we have to be very quiet,” Shelton whispered.

“Why, Daddy?” Caroline said in a normal volume.

The other two girls, Kayla and Sarah, stirred awake, pushing their bed heads of straw-colored hair away from their eyes.

“Daddy!” they squealed.

Shelton dropped to a knee and was swarmed with hugs. Pecks on his face came next, along with an immediate retelling, in no particular order, of their ordeal in traffic.

Maybe I should drop the case
, Shelton thought. He could turn his back on Ritter, take his chances in the free market.
No, there’s a dangerous man out there, and I can get him off the streets…and protect them.

****

In the air conditioner vents throughout the house, microphones collected every spoken word. The recordings were transformed into a wireless signal and sent to a small, windowless vault in the Pentagon with no room number.

An analyst listened to the conversation between Shelton and Mary, and picked up a phone.

Shelton arrived at Ritter’s meeting place, a confluence of fast-food restaurants in Reston just north of the Washington Old Dominion trail. Colloquially, the trio of restaurants was known as McTaco Hut. Shelton parked in front of the Mexican restaurant; the parking lot was empty this early in the morning. There were rumors that the chain would serve some manner of breakfast in the near future. Shelton shook his head at the thought; some sort of waffle/breakfast taco abomination would mean the terrorists won.

Ritter exited the McDonald’s with a greasy bag in one hand, a half-wrapped sausage muffin in the other. Ritter motioned for Shelton to leave his car as he walked through the empty parking lot. Shelton felt for his pistol under his coat and caught up to Ritter.

Ritter took a bite of his breakfast, bliss on his face.

“Fascinating, isn’t it, Greg? I’ve traveled over the whole world, had everything from Thai
patongo
to
labaneh
in Haifa for breakfast, but every time I’m back in the States, this is what I want in the morning.”

“The word I would use is
sad
. Are you going to eat that whole bag?” Shelton asked. The bag in Ritter’s hand, grease spots weeping through the paper, looked like it had another dozen Egg McMuffin sandwiches.

“These aren’t for me,” Ritter said.

Behind the Mexican restaurant was a small office park. Instead of walking under the subdued logo of an intelligence-contracting firm looming over the main entrance, Ritter led Shelton around the side to an emergency exit with no door handle.

Ritter sighed heavily, then held the sack of food out to his side.

“Did you get the onions?” a voice said from an unseen speaker.

“Tony, how many times do I have to tell you that they don’t have onions anywhere on their breakfast menu?” Ritter replied.

“Then go get some,” came the voice from the speaker. Shelton looked around but couldn’t find the camera Tony was using to see them.

“Tony!” Ritter said.

There was a buzz and a metal clank as the emergency exit shifted on its hinges. Inside was a dark hallway; the glow of computer monitors and track lighting came from an open office halfway down the hall. Shelton did a quick comparison of the area and the office building it seemed to be part of. There was no way the volume of that building matched what he saw here.

“What is this place? It’s walled off from the main building?” Shelton asked.

“Well done, Greg. This is our own self-contained facility, a bit of deception to hoodwink the too curious. We keep the facility manager and the building owner on stipend to keep up the Sergeant Schultz routine,” Ritter said.

“You bribe them,” Shelton said.

“Semantics,” Ritter said. They passed open offices, iron cages on wheels against the walls. Each cage was the size of a wall locker. Firearms, body armor, suits of clothes, satellite radios, and a wooden board with straps on it were in the lockers.

“You planning a bank heist?” Shelton asked.

“If we need to, we could certainly pull that off. We prefer to be prepared for a wide variety of contingencies. We only had hammers in the army, and every problem looked like a nail. Now, I have a tool chest,” Ritter said.

Ritter stopped in front of the open doorway and put his hands on his hips. The office was a mess of empty Mountain Dew bottles and loose papers; the smell of body odor and stale pizza crept into Shelton’s nose. An obese man, a virtual bare-skin muffin top lopped over his pants, sat in front of a quad bank of computer screens.

“Tony, you knew we had a guest coming. You couldn’t straighten up? Or shower?” Ritter asked.

“I was on a roll. I figured you could have some actionable intelligence, or I could freshen up. Now give me my food.” Tony spun around on his chair; he wore sweatpants and an XXL T-shirt with a logo of some metal band Shelton had never heard of. He held out his hand.

“You have something for us?” Ritter said, tendering the food like an offering.

Tony shoved most of a McMuffin into his mouth, spun back to his keyboard, and started tapping.

Shelton looked around. Sheets of paper had been haphazardly tacked to boards; yellow sticky notes with incomprehensible script were stuck on top of each. Shelton saw an FD-302, an FBI interview report form, mixed into a loose pile on a desktop. He reached for the report, but Ritter wrapped an iron grip around Shelton’s wrist before he could get too close.

“No touching,” Ritter said in a low voice.

“Those FBI bubbas at TEDAC pulled fingerprints off the shell casings. Partials, two sets, and no DNA. Irene sent it over with some other goodies,” Tony said. “That other bombing on the Beltway? The bomb went off on a guy named Max McBride, a policy wonk and lobbyist. Real mover and shaker with the neocons during the lead up to the Iraq War. He practically put together the narrative for the war when he was with the administration. Naturally, he got nailed for using faulty intel during the senate inquiry after all those weapons of mass destruction weren’t found. Failure was no obstacle for him. He was a conservative thought leader until the explosion.”

“Any connection between him and our first bombing victim?” Shelton asked.

“Zero, and I
looked
,” Tony said. “Anyway, we got a hit on one of the partials, and here’s where it gets weird.” A mug shot popped up on one of the screens; it was a Hispanic man, his face slack and eyes unfocused. The gloved hand of a police officer had to hold his chin up for the photo. The man’s teeth, what few remained, were blackened posts jutting from his gums.

“What a winner, right? This is Aaron Garcia, arrested two weeks ago in DC for methamphetamine possession and disturbing the peace. It was his first arrest,” Tony said. He unwrapped another sandwich and started eating.

“There’s no way that’s his first arrest. Someone that deep into a meth addiction like that has to have priors,” Shelton said. The FBI Academy made it a point to show cadets the progressive damage methamphetamine did to its users. The drug ground hale and hearty men and women down into wretches within a few years, ravaging skin and mouths.

“Your beard is pretty smart,” Tony said to Ritter. “Garcia does have priors but not in the system we use every day. Someone erased his entire record but didn’t bother to do the same favor after his last bust.” The fat man pointed to a screen, where a rap sheet popped up with dozens of entries.

“Maybe he gave a fake name,” Shelton said. Ritter winced at Shelton’s statement.

“What?” Tony spun around, crumbs stuck in his three-day stubble. “I spent eight hours in the repository gathering everything from his high school transcripts to his birth certificate and bouncing his banking record off of every place he used a credit card. Until he decided his meth addiction was worth his full attention and maxed out all his cards. All his records still exist, just not in the aboveground system.” Tony’s pale skin slowly flushed red as an inner rage fought its way to the surface.

“Tell us about the deletions,” Ritter said.

Tony pushed himself to his feet and waddled around the room. He grabbed seemingly random sheets of paper and waved them over his head.

“All done at one time. Someone at the Justice Department, by the IP they used, scrubbed him out of the federal database. Same thing at the same time for the system in Virginia and Maryland.” Tony handed the papers to Shelton, printouts of raw computer code with a few lines highlighted in yellow.

“Wait. Can we back up? How is any of this possible?” Shelton said.

Tony rolled his eyes and went back to his keyboard.

Ritter leaned closer to Shelton. “During the Cold War, when DC was high on the Soviet’s to-nuke list, Congress passed a law mandating that a copy of every document the federal government ever produced be backed up so whatever government survives has a bureaucratic primer to start from. So, there are repositories, vast storehouses of microfiche, digital tape, and servers buried under a few select mountains across this great land of ours. When we need to, we tap into it. No pesky warrants of Freedom of Information Act requests to bother with.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of it?” Shelton asked.

“Let’s say some government employees thought they could cover up some malfeasance by destroying their hard drives or deleting e-mail from a server. The repositories are a nice little gotcha for those types,” Ritter said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Shelton said.

“I’m sorry, Greg. This ear is bad. Too close to a car bomb in Mosul.” He turned his attention from Shelton with a wink. “Tony, what else?”

“Whoever scrubbed Garcia scrubbed someone else out of the system at the same time,” Tony said. “I’m still working on that other person. I found Garcia because he has a hit in both systems.”

“Where can we find Mr. Garcia? His prints are on the bullets used in the assassination of Bendis. I’d say he deserves a visit from us,” Ritter said.

“Garcia had a GPS tracker on his ankle after he made bail from his ‘first’ arrest. I say ‘had’ because he cut it off this morning.” Tony pointed to a map of Washington, DC, a red pin in a southeast neighborhood. “That was the location of the last ping on his tracker. Cutting it off generated an automatic arrest warrant, so the local DC police are keeping an eye out for him.”

“So we’ve got to find a meth addict somewhere on the streets of DC,” Ritter said, a bit dejected.

“Tony, druggies are creatures of habit. Can you find his dealer or where he used? Meth houses he’d frequent?” Shelton asked. This would come down to old-fashioned police work. There was no need for whatever cloak-and-dagger nonsense Ritter might have planned.

Tony’s hands cupped his chubby face. His voice squeaked, “What am I, a frigging amateur? Here.” Tony pulled a greasy sheet of paper from under his keyboard and handed it to Ritter. “Start at the top of the list and work down. I ranked them from most to least likely. You’re welcome. You and your beard can bring me some Five Guys burgers when you come back.” Tony put on a pair of headphones and started mumbling as he turned his attention to his monitors.

Ritter opened a desk drawer and tossed a wrapped stack of dollars to Shelton. Shelton ran his thumb over the top of the stack, two inches of twenties and hundreds.

“Snitch money. Incidentals. Whatever we need,” Ritter said. He stuck an envelope of bills into a jacket pocket from the same drawer.

“Eric, this…Don’t I have to sign something?” Shelton asked. Spending cash in the course of an investigation was a very painful affair in the FBI. Receipts, acceptable-use policy statements, quarterly refresher training, and invoices of all expenditures were needed for every source meeting where so much as a cup of coffee was purchased. Despite all these restrictions, agents still got caught spending their operating funds at strip clubs and for home improvements.

“Again, with your rules. If you need more, we have more. Shall we?” Ritter walked out the door and opened the room next door.

“Wait. We need a warrant for Garcia in the death of Bendis,” Shelton said.

Ritter hit the lights, and a room full of cages came into view. Firearms, ranging from small pistols that could fit into his palm to kitted-out M4s with the latest red-dot sights and infra-red target designators, were in the cages on top of loaded magazines and grenades still in their shipping tubes. Shelton’s jaw went slack as he took in the arsenal.

Ritter opened a cage and pulled out a worn set of warm clothing. He opened a drawer and took out a plastic bag full of loose bills in small denominations.

“Eric, what is this place?” Shelton peered into a cage, where a pile of C4 plastic explosives in thick plastic sleeves sat below a rack of tailored Armani suits and tuxedos.

“A bit cliché, I know, but we have to be prepared for everything. You want some hollow-point rounds for your sidearm? Get some actual stopping power?” Ritter stripped down to his underwear and pulled on a pair of stained pants. Ritter had more scars than Shelton remembered: a nasty pucker of pale scar tissue covered his right deltoid, a bullet wound if Shelton had ever seen one.

“No, hollow-point rounds are illegal in Virginia. You want to bring me up to speed on what you’re planning?” Shelton asked.

“Greg, one doesn’t simply walk into a drug house dressed like an FBI agent.” Ritter strapped a pistol to his ankle and an Applegate-Fairbairn combat knife to his forearm.

****

Lying on frozen ground wasn’t new for Jefferson. Being homeless taught a number of survival skills his time in the army hadn’t. A flattened cardboard box and crumpled newspaper beneath his clothes did wonders to keep his body heat from the winter soil’s heat sink.

In a few more minutes, he would shake off the cold. There was a warm tent and a stash of granola bars waiting for him at the park. Just a few more minutes until retribution. He and his target had a schedule to keep.

A branch snapped in the distance. Jefferson turned his head slowly toward the noise; sudden movement demanded attention from the human eye. A doe and her fawn picked their way past an icy stream bed, unaware of his presence. Not that they had anything to fear from him. Nature, perfect in its chaos, was beyond his judgment.

One hundred and seven million dollars—that was how much the leech, Guy Allesio, had made from the war. One hundred and seven million dollars peddling twenty-dollar rolls of toilet paper and eighty-five-dollars-a-plate meals of frozen chicken paddies and locally bought cans of soda that increased 5,000 percent in price before they made it into the hands of a deployed soldier.