20
MICHAEL WAS PARKED IN FRONT OF A BRICK apartment building in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. He sat behind the wheel and sipped a cup of piping hot Colombian coffee he had just picked up at the Starbucks two blocks away. He looked down at his digital phone and then up at the Ford Explorer that was parked three cars ahead of him. It belonged to the man he wanted to talk to. O’Rourke had already called up to the apartment twice and had got the answering machine both times.
O’Rourke was growing impatient. He
desperately wanted to talk to the man who lived in the building. He
tapped his hand on the steering wheel and guessed that his friend
was out for a jog. O’Rourke knew he was in town because he had
called his office and checked. Five minutes and half a cup
of coffee
later, he saw a man with a dark blue baseball cap and a large
backpack thrown over his shoulder round the
corner.
Michael set his coffee in the center
console and got out of his truck. Straightening his tie, he walked
up onto the curb and locked eyes with the man. “You’re awfully hard
to get ahold of.”
The lean individual gave Michael a
surprised look. “I’m sorry. I’ve been on the
run.”
“Don’t you get your messages? I’ve called
a dozen times in the last three days.” Michael stuck out his hand,
and his friend grabbed it.
“Sorry, I’ve been awfully busy.” The man,
who was six years Michael’s elder, adjusted the backpack on his
shoulder and glanced up and down the street with his alert
eyes.
Michael looked around. “Am I keeping you
from something?”
“I have a lot to do today, but I can
always spare a few minutes for my little brother’s best
friend.”
O’Rourke was warmed by the comment. The
man standing before him was Scott Coleman, the older brother of
Mark Coleman, O’Rourke’s best friend who was killed a year earlier.
Scott Coleman was the former commander of SEAL Team Six, America’s
premier counterterrorism unit. He also happened to be the person
Michael had been worrying about since last
Friday.
Coleman had left the SEALs almost a year
ago after a highly decorated sixteen-year stint. Despite his
illustrious career, he did not leave on a happy note. He had lost
half of his SEAL team in a mission over northern Libya the previous
year.
Upon returning from the mission Coleman
was informed that their assault on a terrorist training camp had
been compromised because a high-profile politician had leaked the
mission. When his superiors refused to reveal the identity of the
politician, Coleman resigned in disgust. O’Rourke had found out
through Senator Olson, who was the chairman of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, that Senator Fitzgerald was the person in
question.
Michael had labored as to whether he
should tell Coleman. They had grown closer since the death of Mark
Coleman, and while on a hunting trip the previous fall Michael
finally decided to confide in the warrior. Seamus was right: if
they were his men, he would want and deserve to know. Coleman had
taken the news about Fitzgerald in silence, and that was the only
time he and Michael had discussed the issue. But when Senator
Fitzgerald turned up dead a week ago, Michael could only
wonder.
O’Rourke put his hands in his pockets and
shifted uneasily. “That was quite a deal with the president’s
helicopter this afternoon. You wouldn’t by chance know anything
about who might do such a thing, would
you?”
“Nope.” Coleman stared unflinchingly at
Michael with his bright blue eyes.
“Do you remember that hunting trip we went
on last year?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember that bit of information I
passed on to you?”
“Yep.”
Michael returned Coleman’s stare and
nodded. After several moments of silence Michael decided to
change his approach. “So what do you think about the
assassinations?”
Coleman’s face stayed expressionless. “I’m
not doing a lot of mourning, if that’s what you’re
asking.”
“No.” O’Rourke shook his head. “I didn’t
think you would be. Any idea who might be behind
them?”
Coleman cocked his head to the side. “No,
do you?”
“I might.” Michael rocked back and forth
on his heels.
“Are you
alone?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t by chance talked to anyone at
the FBI lately?”
O’Rourke shook his
head.
“Good. Are you planning on talking to
anyone at the FBI?”
“No. I think you and I can handle this
oneonone.”
Coleman raised one of his eyebrows and
shot Michael a questioning look.
“Hypothetically,” asked O’Rourke, “if you
knew who the assassins were, do you think you could give them a
message from me?”
“Hypothetically?” Coleman folded his arms
across his chest. “I suppose almost anything is
possible.”
“Tell them”—Michael leaned in close—“that
there has been enough killing. Tell them to give us some time to
implement their reforms before this thing gets any
uglier.”
“That sounds like a good idea, but I’m not
so sure the president and his people have gotten the
hint. And
now our friend Senator Olson is trying to screw things up.” Coleman
shook his head. “I don’t think these guys are done killing. At
least not until the president and the others come
around.”
“So you think there will be more
assassinations?”
“I wouldn’t
know.”
Michael rolled his eyes.
“Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically speaking . . . who
knows?”
Both men stared each other down for a
while, both refusing to blink. Finally Coleman looked at his watch
and said, “I’m running late. I should really get going. Let’s get
together for lunch next week.”
Michael reached out and grabbed Coleman’s
arm. “Scott, I understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. If
Fitzgerald had compromised the security of me and my men during the
Gulf and gotten even one of my men killed, I would have come home
and gutted him like a pig. I’m not going to pass judgment on you,
but I think it’s time to let the politicians finish what’s been
started.”
“Like they did in Iraq.” Coleman shook his
head. “I think these boys are going all the way to Baghdad. No
half-assed jobs this time. You politicians, present company
excluded, have a history of screwing things up when the clear
objective is within reach.”
Michael couldn’t argue with the historical
comparison. “Let it rest” was the only answer he could
muster.
Coleman nodded and turned toward his
apartment. As he reached the first step, he turned to Michael and
said, “There is one thing you can do. Do you still keep in touch
with Senator Olson?”
“Yes.”
“It might be a good idea to tell him now
is not a good time to get into bed with the
president.”
Michael felt the hair on the back of his
neck rise. “Keep Erik out of this,
Scott.”
“I’m sure Erik will be fine. I’m just
saying hypothetically it would be a good idea to warn him.” Coleman
gave Michael a half salute and entered the building.
McMahon walked down the executive hallway
at a quicker than normal pace. The day had been one of nonstop
commotion. The media was everywhere, sticking a microphone or a
camera in McMahon’s face at every turn. The events surrounding the
president’s unusual flight to Camp David were coming together like
a jigsaw puzzle, and a crucial piece of the puzzle had just been
discovered. McMahon hadn’t had the chance to check his voice mail
until just minutes before. The message left by the assassins had
sat untouched for over five hours. McMahon nodded to Director
Roach’s secretary and continued through the door, closing it behind
him.
Roach was on the phone and looked up at
McMahon. McMahon towered over the edge of Roach’s desk, waving his
finger in a circular motion, signaling his boss to wrap up the
conversation, that there was something more important to talk
about. Roach nodded and told the person on the other end that he
needed to go. Hanging up the phone, Roach asked, “What’s
up?”
“We got a message from our friends and
it’s been sitting under my nose all
day.”
“What do you mean ‘friends’?” Roach asked
with a quizzical look on his face.
“The assassins.” McMahon walked around the
edge of Roach’s desk and punched his voice mail number into the
phone. When it was ready to go, he pushed the speaker button.
“Listen to this.”
The computerized voice played from the
small speaker. Roach sat transfixed, listening intently as light
was shed on the afternoon’s events. When the message was over,
Roach asked McMahon to play it again. After it was played for the
second time, McMahon saved it and looked to his boss for a
reaction.
“Who in the hell are these guys?” Roach
asked with a deeply puzzled look.
“They’re not terrorists, Brian. Let’s come
to an agreement on that right now, and they’re not some fringe
white-supremacist group. If they were, they would have blown the
president out of the sky. Terrorists don’t give a shit about
killing Secret Service agents or Marines. These guys are exactly
who Kennedy said they were from day one. They’re former
commandos.”
“I think you’re right, and besides,
terrorists wouldn’t send this to us, they’d send it to the media.
The more exposure, the better. . . . Can we be sure this is from
the group responsible for the previous
attacks?”
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure. The message
was left about fifteen minutes after Marine One took off from the
White House, and the computerized voice sounds the same as the one
that was left with ABC after Basset’s assassination. I’m having our
lab analyze the sound signature right
now.”
“How long will it take them to
verify?”
“They told me within the hour. When are
you going to tell the president?”
“I’m flying out to Camp David in about
thirty minutes to brief him. I’ll wait and do it in person.” Roach
stared off at nothing for a moment while he thought about the tape.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I’m sure you’ve got
plenty to keep you busy around here. Besides, I know how much you
hate these briefings.”
“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t miss seeing the
expression on Garret’s face when he hears that these guys are onto
him.”
Roach nodded his head in agreement and
looked at his watch. “Be back up here in thirty minutes. I’ve got a
chopper picking us up on the roof.”
“One more thing, the boys over at the
Secret Service have been getting beat up all day. If it’s all right
with you, I’d like to let Jack Warch take the lead on telling the
president about the radar units and the flare launcher. I’ll back
him up on what we’re doing to investigate the new evidence, and
I’ll let you handle the message from the assassins if you
want.”
“No, that’s all right, you can handle it,
and go ahead and let Warch take the
lead.”
McMahon left Roach’s office and headed
back to his.
The chopper ride from the Hoover Building
to Camp David took about twenty-five minutes. Roach, McMahon, and
two of the director’s bodyguards sat in back. Roach utilized the
time by having McMahon bring him up to speed on every aspect of the
investigation. After landing, they were driven to the main cabin
and escorted to the conference room.
It was just after 7
P.M.
when the president and
Garret entered the room, taking their spots at the head of the
table. Mike Nance was seated at the far end of the table so he
could observe everyone, while Stansfield, Roach, and McMahon were
seated on the one side, with Warch and Director Tracy on the
other.
Garret looked at Roach and in a tired
voice asked, “Director Roach, do you have any new developments to
report since we talked earlier?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, we have
received a message from the assassins. I’ll let Special Agent
McMahon fill you in.” Roach turned to McMahon and
nodded.
Each spot at the large conference table
had a phone in front of it. McMahon pulled the one in front of him
closer and punched in his voice mail number. “Just before we left
this evening, we discovered a message left by the assassins. If
you’ll bear with me for a moment, I’ll retrieve it.” McMahon
finished accessing the message, hit the speaker button, and slid
his chair back. The message started to
play:
“Special Agent McMahon, we know you have
been placed in charge of investigating the assassinations of
Senator Fitzgerald, Congressman Koslowski, Senator Downs, and
Speaker Basset. We are sending you this message because we do not
want to fight our battle in the media.” Both the
president and Garret looked up at McMahon upon hearing his
name.
The message continued while everyone
listened intently. When the tape ended with, “Mr. President, the
Secret Service cannot protect you from us. They can make our job
more difficult, but they cannot stop us from ending your life. This
is your last warning,” the pale president looked to Jack Warch and
Director Tracy for reassurance but only got straight faces and
silence in return. Garret leaned back in his chair and placed both
hands under his armpits to keep them from shaking. The silence was
only making him more uncomfortable, so he looked at McMahon and
snapped, “How do we even know if this thing is
real?”
McMahon responded in an even tone, “Some
of our lab technicians analyzed it just before I left. They say it
has the same voice signature of the recording we received after
Speaker Basset was shot.”
Garret started to grind his teeth. He
didn’t like surprises, and he had no doubt that McMahon and Roach
had intentionally withheld the tape from him until just now.
Through clenched teeth he asked, “How long have you known about
this tape?”
“I checked my voice mail for the first
time since this morning at about six this
evening.”
“When did the assassins leave
it?”
“At about twelve-thirty this
afternoon.”
Garret sprang to the edge of the table.
“You’ve had this since twelve-thirty and you haven’t told us about
it?”
“The assassins left it on my voice mail at
twelve- thirty, but I did not discover it until six. Considering
the fact that we were coming out here to brief you at seven,
Director Roach and I decided that we would play the recording for
you when we got here.”
“Hold on, back up a minute. Don’t you
usually check your voice mail more than once a
day?”
“On a normal day, yes, but I was a little
busy today.”
Garret pointed his finger at McMahon and
raising his voice said, “The next time you get something this
important, you let us know immediately! There is absolutely no
excuse other than incompetency for not informing us of this
recording as soon as you found it!”
McMahon was enjoying himself too much to
let what Garret was saying upset him. Leaning back in his chair,
McMahon folded his arms and smiled.
Jack Warch, who was sitting next to
Garret, leaned forward and caught the chief of staff’s eye. Warch
gave Garret a hard stare. The message was clear. Garret looked down
at his notepad and mumbled something to
himself.
No one spoke for a while, and then a
nervous President Stevens attempted to speak. The words didn’t come
out right the first time, so he started over. “Could they have shot
down Marine One today?”
Without pausing for a second, Warch
answered, “Yes.”
In the most polite tone he could muster,
Garret cleared his throat and said, “Jack, let’s not be so
presumptuous. We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions
until we get more
information.” Garret didn’t like anyone getting the president
frazzled unless it was him.
Warch shrugged his shoulders and said, “I
am basing my opinion on nothing more than the facts. These
assassins have shown an incredible propensity to plan ahead. They
not only discovered which helicopter the president was on, but they
forced Marine One and her escorts to fly a course they were not
supposed to. I spoke with the pilots, and they said there is no
doubt in their minds that Marine One could have been blown out of
the sky this afternoon.”
The president closed his eyes and shook
his head. Several seconds later he looked at Warch and asked, “Can
you protect me or not?”
“If you continue to ignore my advice,
no.”
“What do you mean ignore your advice?”
asked the president in a pleading tone. He looked to Warch’s boss
this time for an answer, but didn’t get
one.
Warch had convinced his boss to stay out
of it and let him put the fear of God into the president. Warch
leaned forward and got the president’s attention. “Sir, when you
and Mr. Garret informed me that you wanted to hold your budget
summit at Camp David, I told you it was a bad idea and that it
should be held at the White House. Because you ignored that advice,
you were almost killed today.” Warch paused briefly, his voice
taking on a more authoritative tone. “Special Agent Dorle told
Speaker Basset that he should cancel all public appearances. The
Speaker ignored his advice and now he’s dead. . . . I have been telling
you for two and a half years that security around the White House
is lax, that the press is given too much freedom to come and go as
they please. Well, it all came home to roost today. I found out how
the assassins knew which helicopter you were
on.”
Warch again paused and looked at the
president, letting the tension mount. He was going to play this
hand for everything it was worth. “My agents tore apart everything
that was within sight of the South Lawn. One of them found a
transponder attached to the live-signal feed underneath the control
panel of the ABC News van. While arranging security for this trip,
I suggested that the media be banned from the South Lawn while the
helicopters were coming and going. I thought this precaution was
appropriate considering the fact that four politicians have been
assassinated in the last week. This request was ignored because it
was deemed too important of a news event to have a media blackout,
so the media was allowed to tape the entire event. Several members
of your staff even wanted to let the media carry the event live. I
told them that was out of the question, and we reached a compromise
that allowed the media to tape your departure and then show it
later.
“Just before the first helicopter landed,
my agents shut down the live feeds on all the news vans and made
them go to tape. At some point after that, the assassins activated
a transponder that they’d planted underneath the ABC News van’s
control board. Once this was turned on, they were able to watch
everything that happened on the South
Lawn in real time. These
assassins know where our weaknesses are, and they know that our
ability to protect you is directly related to your desire to be
protected. They obviously understand the relationship between a
politician and the media, and if you continue to make yourself
accessible to the media and the public, we will not be able to
protect you.”
The president looked at his chief
protector and said, “Jack, do whatever you need to make things more
secure, and I’ll listen to you.”
Roach, noticing that the president was in
an unusually decisive and agreeable mood, decided to make his move.
“Mr. President, our investigation has hit a wall. We believe these
assassins are former United States commandos. Special Agent McMahon
and his people have received very little cooperation from the
Special Forces people at the Pentagon. They are stonewalling us at
every turn.”
The president’s head jerked from Roach to
Nance. “Mike, what’s the problem?”
“Well, sir, there are certain national
security issues involved here. Most of these personnel files are
either top secret or contain top secret information about covert
missions.”
The president cut Nance off for the first
time in their professional relationship. “I don’t want to hear
about problems. I want to see some results.” Stevens turned his
head away from Nance and back to Roach. “I will have an executive
order ready by tomorrow morning giving Special Agent McMahon
permission to review any personnel file he wishes. We are done
dragging our feet on this. I want these people
caught!”
Nance looked at the president from the
other end of the table and bit his lip. Stevens was too emotional
right now, he would have to wait until later to discuss this issue.
There was no way in the world someone without top secret clearance
was going to get carte blanche on those files. Especially someone
from the FBI.
While Nance tried to think of a way around
this new problem, Warch briefed the participants on the evidence
they’d found under the bridge—such as the radar dishes, and what
efforts were being made to track the serial numbers. As the
briefing continued, it dawned on Nance that Garret was unusually
quiet. Nance attributed it to the threat the assassins had made on
his life. Nance’s mind moved from Garret to Stansfield. Why was
Director Stansfield so quiet during the discussion of Special
Forces personnel files? Surely it was in the CIA’s best interest to
keep those files away from the eyes of the
FBI.
The meeting ended just after
8 P.M., and everyone left the conference room except Garret and
Nance. When the door closed, Garret dropped his head into his hands
and rubbed his eyes. “What a fucking
mess.”
Nance shifted in his chair and crossed his
legs. He watched Garret and tried to guess what he was thinking.
Nance tilted his head back and asked, “Stu, you were awfully quiet
during the briefing. Did that tape get to
you?”
Garret let his hands fall to the table and
looked up with bloodshot eyes. “No . . . maybe a little . . . I
don’t know.” Garret reached into his shirt pocket. “God, I need a
cigarette.” He shoved one in his mouth and lit it. After taking a deep drag
he said, “They can’t kill me if I don’t give them the chance. I
won’t leave the White House for a month. I’ll take one of the guest
bedrooms and move in.” Garret took several more deep drags and
frowned. “I’m not scared of these terrorists. I’m worried about
something else. We’ve got another problem, and it’s not good. Warch
knows about the job we did on Frank Moore. He told me he knows who
was involved, and if I don’t back off and listen to him, he’ll tell
the FBI.” Garret stood up and started pacing. “When it rains, it
pours. It’s not like we don’t already have enough problems, and now
we’ve got this to deal with.”
Nance watched Garret intently and kept his
outward composure. “Did he mention my
name?”
Without looking at Nance, Garret paused
and said, “Yes.”
“Did he mention any other
names?”
“Yes.”
“Whose?”
Garret looked at Nance briefly and then
looked at a painting on the wall. “He mentioned
Arthur’s.”
Nance felt a sharp pain shoot through his
temples. “He mentioned Arthur?”
Garret reluctantly nodded his head. “I
have no idea how he found out. I didn’t talk to anyone about
it.”
Nance’s demeanor remained placid, but
inside he was boiling. Without having to think very hard he knew
exactly how Warch had found out. He or one of his people must have
overheard Stu talking to God-knows-who about their little blackmail
operation.
“Arthur will not be happy about this. I’m
sure he will want to talk to you at length. Clear your schedule for
tomorrow evening. He wants to talk to us about something else, and
it can’t wait. I’ll arrange for some discreet
transportation.”