Day Zero (15 page)

 

“S
he’s just coming back from her run now.” The man in black BDUs and a matching ballistic vest spoke into the voice-activated microphone pinned to his collar. He was on the heavy side, with a jowly face and wavy hair that had been slicked back with half a jar of pomade. “She’ll be rounding the corner toward you in less than two minutes.”

“Copy that, Joey,” Agent Glen Walter said, giving one last piece of advice before his team made contact. “Okay, boys. This is sure to make the ten o’clock news. Make it look professional.”

 

 

Her code name was
Fable
—and she had zero doubt that any of the five men and women jogging around her in the loose diamond formation would take a bullet on her behalf. The same went for the agent on the twelve-speed race bike ten yards ahead and the young man in the armored Suburban that crunched slowly along the road behind them. It was getting dark, and though CIA Director Virginia Ross’s Rockville neighborhood was upscale to the point of old-money snobbishness, the protective agent in charge of her detail hated it when she ran so late in the evening.

Adam Knight had been with her for the past three years and he was still as doting and overprotective as a young father with a first baby. Rarely letting her out of his line of sight, even at state functions, he often looked as if he wanted to taste her food before she ate it, just to be on the safe side. The tragic assassination of both President Clark and the Vice President had, she supposed, taken its toll on every agent charged with the protection of government officials.

Still, Ross had to live her life. She had an agency to run—and a body that wasn’t getting any younger.

She’d never been a skinny woman, but eight months earlier her doctor had pointed out that she was lugging around the equivalent of a bushel of corn in extra body weight. To get rid of that burden had meant lots of walking at first. Later, when half that bushel had gone the way of the dodo, her fifty-four-year-old knees had been able to take her on long and glorious—if ploddingly slow—runs. She’d always been bottom heavy. Thankfully, her deceased math-professor husband hadn’t minded what he called her “butt to boobs ratio.” One could not put in what God had seen fit to leave out and she would forever be built like a pear, no matter how much she exercised. But the good Lord didn’t say that numbers in her husband’s ratio had to be quite so large.

Ross wasn’t oblivious to the stress living her life caused her protective detail. As a sort of moral trade, she made it a habit to get to know them all personally, along with the names of their spouses and significant others. She couldn’t keep their kids straight, but forgave herself for that since she had trouble keeping up with the names of her own nine grandchildren.

Three blocks from home, Ross picked up the pace, catching a smile from the tawny woman jogging next to her. Wiki was her name, a broad-shouldered Maori woman of twenty-nine. She’d spent time as an MP in the Army before joining the CIA’s Protective Division. Most of the men and women on Ross’s detail had military service—and while some clandestine agents thought of the protective folks as the knuckle-draggers of the agency, she’d come to respect their dedication and that no-BS swagger that earned them the reputation of knuckle-draggers in the first place.

More academic than spy, Ross had grown up on an Iowa farm seeing the value of hard work and the good in her neighbors. In college, she talked her way out of trouble and into a political circle of friends that got her plucked from a career as an economics professor at Dartmouth to become the US ambassador to Chile before she was forty years old. A knack for being in the right place at the right time had put her in line to be director of the CIA under the president prior to Chris Clark’s administration. She’d done well her first few years, putting her mark on the agency and, to her way of thinking, making it better. Then, both her husband and her youngest daughter had passed away without any warning, sending her into a nosedive that surely bled into her professional life. It had taken her the better part of two years to dig her way out of that one, never quite having the energy to resign, but believing Clark would name a replacement at any moment. The fall of a very bright star was a notable, and often celebrated, event in DC. When otherwise brilliant people stumbled, the difference was drastic. The press and others who wanted the job circled like sharks.

Things looked as though they might be getting better. Cogent thoughts began to work their way back into Ross’s head. She took an active interest in life again, and dreaded the thought of being replaced. She knew Winfield Palmer had President Clark’s ear and had spoken to him several times about it. He seemed happy enough with her performance to let things remain status quo long enough that if she did leave, it would be on a positive note.

Then Hartman Drake had taken over. Ross didn’t quite know what to think about him. It would take some time, she thought, time to learn exactly what he was all about. In the interim, she’d keep running, climbing out of her personal funk, and leading the agency as best she could until he fired her.

Just off her right shoulder, she saw Adam Knight lift a small microphone to his lips, calling ahead to the residence no doubt, to let them know that “Fable’s arrival was imminent.” She’d not chosen the code name herself, but Ross liked it. She was a woman in a business traditionally dominated by men with code names like Renegade, Lancer, and Rawhide.
Fable
let her pretend an air of femininity in the testosterone-infused world.

Panting now, sweat soaking the front of her green Dartmouth T-shirt, Ross glanced over at Wiki, who loped along easily beside her. Ross’s feet, carried by somewhat stubby legs, hit the ground twice for each one of the young agent’s lengthy strides. Long, graceful arms seemed always ready to reach out and catch her or stop some oncoming threat. It was impossible not to notice the black fanny pack cinched tightly round the young woman’s waist and the beige radio wire that led to her flesh-colored earpiece.

“Race you the last block,” Ross said as they rounded the corner on the homestretch to her house.

“Feeling energetic are we today, ma’am?” Wiki said, saying “energetic” in the particularly pinched nasal New Zealander accent Ross found endearing.

She had bowed her head to pick up the pace when the agent on the bicycle slid to an abrupt halt and began to shout,

“Gun front! Gun front!”

Adam Knight bolted into the lead, yelling, “Ambush! Ambush! Ambush!” into his lapel mike.

Ross caught a fleeting glimpse of men standing in front of her house half a block away. She couldn’t see any guns, but trusted her detail. An instant later, Wiki enveloped her. The protective agent used her own arm as a fulcrum, jamming it into Ross’s solar plexus while at the same time grabbing her by the back of her collar and bending her forward at the waist. They ran together toward the Suburban.

Ross’s driver screeched in next to the curb. The forward agent had already thrown his bike to the street and stood with pistol drawn beside the open door, scanning for threats beyond the obvious. Wiki shoved Ross in the backseat—nearly ripping her T-shirt off in the process—and then piled in beside her. Adam Knight jumped in the front passenger seat and slammed the heavy armored door. He beat on the dash with the flat of his hand.

“Go, go, go!”

Once Ross was in the relative safety of the armored Suburban, the driver threw the vehicle in reverse, accelerating backwards away from the threat. Per protocol, he abandoned the agents on the ground to fight their own way out.

Still on her belly, Ross was thrown forward, smacking the front seats. She slid into the armrest with Wiki piling up behind her as the driver suddenly let off the gas and cranked the wheel, spinning the SUV in a quick 180 to head toward the safe site, the Rockville Police Station less than three miles away.

Ross tried to raise her head to get a peek at what was going on, but Wiki leaned on top of her, pressing her down.

“The truck’s armored,” the agent said, her Kiwi accent stronger from the stress of battle, “but I don’t know what sort of weapons they have, ma’am. Let’s keep our coconuts down, shall we for now?”

Knight snatched up the microphone clipped to the console. “Rockville PD, Rockville PD, Fable Limo,” he said, his voice much calmer than the sweat on his upper lip made him look. He shot a backward glance at Ross while he waited for a response. “You okay, ma’am?”

“I’m fine,” Ross said. “What—”

The dispatcher cut her off.

“Fable Limo, Fable Limo, go ahead for Rockville PD.”

“Possible compromise at Fable residence,” Knight said. “We’re four minutes out, en route to your location.”

“Ten-four, Fable Limo,” the dispatcher came back. “You are clear on this end.”

As detail supervisor, Knight would have made it a point to liaise with nearby police departments and hospitals in the event their assistance was ever needed. The detail often ran drills, but they were dry runs that Ross only read about. She’d never taken the time to participate in one.

“What did you see, Adam?” she asked, still pressed down against the seat.

Knight held up his hand and continued his radio conversation. “Fable CP, Fable CP, Limo,” he said, trying to raise the command post at the residence. He cursed when there was no answer.

Brian Shumway, the agent who’d been on the bicycle, came across on the radio. His voice was breathless, but in control. “No idea what’s going on, boss,” he said. “I’m not getting the CP either—by radio or cell.”

“Tell me what you do see,” Knight said, still tapping the dashboard with his open palm, willing the Suburban to go faster.

“I count three white males,” Shumway said. “All with MP5s standing in the front yard. Barb and I have good positions about half a block out, but these guys aren’t doing a damn thing. They know we’re here, but they don’t seem to care.”

“Okay, sit tight,” Knight said. “PD will have SWAT heading your way.”

 

 

The CIA had footed the bill for a series of heavy concrete bollards to reinforce the fenced parking area behind the Rockville Police Department. They’d also paid for the steel-wedge barrier that had to be lowered to enter or exit the lot in a vehicle. Knight used a remote that looked like a garage door opener to lower the barrier when they were fifty yards away.

“PD, PD, Fable Limo,” Knight said as they spend into the parking lot, the barrier coming up behind them. “Arrival. Arrival.”

“Ten-four, Fable,” the dispatcher said. “Chief’s at the back door to bring you in.”

Ross adjusted her sweaty T-shirt and tugged at the legs of the shorts. They were fine for running, but seemed much too immodest to be wearing during an attack. She often ran in public, but wasn’t accustomed to being thought of as the director of the CIA dressed only in gym gear. Stress made her chuckle at the thought.

Knight got out of the car first, checking the surroundings to make certain they were clear before opening Ross’s door.

Disheveled or not, Ross was a professional. She put on a pleasant face for the chief as they hurried toward the open back door to the PD where the lanky man waited to greet her. He was not smiling, a fact that made both Adam Knight and Wiki stop in their tracks.

A second man Ross did not recognize, with dirty blond hair and a high forehead, stepped out from behind the chief. Rumpled as if from an all-night drinking binge, he held up both hands to say he came in peace. A cadre of three other agents, all stodgy and overfed-looking things, piled up behind the man in the wrinkled suit.

“Glen Walter,” he said. “ID Task Force.”

Ross cringed at the mention of the IDTF. She shrugged the protesting Wiki off her arm and stepped around Adam Knight. If someone had taken over the police department to ambush her, there was little any of them could do about it at this point. The fact that this was an IDTF man made her think things were even worse than that.

“Virginia Ross,” she said. “What can I do for you, Mr. Walters?”

The man’s face pulled into a half smile as he extended his hand. “It’s Walter,” he said. “There’s no ‘s.’ Madam Director, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

Knight drew his weapon and pointed it at Walter. “You step back until I figure out exactly who you are.”

Walter raised his hands again, giving a nod to Knight’s pistol as if this sort of thing happened to him all the time. “It’s a touchy thing to serve an arrest warrant on someone when they have the luxury of a protective detail.”

“You don’t arrest a sitting director of the CIA,” Knight snapped. “Not without the President getting involved.”

“Believe me,” Walter said, still smiling a sort of smirky half grin that made Ross’s stomach sink with dread. “I wouldn’t get within ten miles of something like this without making sure all the piddly work was done up front. I’ve already taken the liberty of providing a copy of the warrant to the PD.”

Ross looked at the chief, who gave her a solemn nod. “It’s legitimate, ma’am,” he said.

“I assume those are your men back at my house,” Ross said.

“They are,” Walter said.

“Well, call them off right now,” she said. “Before we have a blue-on-blue shooting.”

“Good idea,” Walter said. Ross thought he might be from Florida or maybe Louisiana. Walter nodded to a shorter man with thinning blond hair. “Go ahead and call Benavidez.” He let his eyes play up and down Ross’s body, shaking his head. “Forgive me for saying so, but you’ve lost a heck of a lot of weight from your photographs.”

Knight, who was on the phone with CIA general counsel, stopped talking and turned to Walter. “I don’t care if you’re the President’s favorite nephew. Talk to the director like that again and I’ll kick your ass across this parking lot.” He wasn’t pointing his pistol, but he’d not gone so far as to return it to the holster in his fanny pack.