Gideon's War/Hard Target (51 page)

“No. Dahlgren told them I’m nuts and you’re a rogue agent under suspension who’s fantasizing about some phantom attack on American soil. They’ll never listen to me, or you. We’re on our own. Here’s what we know. Verhoven and Lorene were holding hostage the family of a Secret Service agent named Shanelle Klotz. They told her she had to open a door or her family would be killed. She must be with them now. If we can find out where she’s posted at the State of the Union address, we’ll have a chance to stop them.”

“Give me a minute. There might be something I can do.”

“Hurry up. We’re on 66 right now. We’ll hit Washington in about ten minutes. If the Secret Service won’t do anything, we’ll have to get in there ourselves.”

“You’ll need my help.”

“I’ll call you back, okay? Just work on where Wilmot and Collier are.”

The phone clicked dead, leaving Nancy staring at the blue-and-white Skype logo.

“What about heating ducts?”

Nancy turned around. “What about them?”

Hank was hanging over her shoulder, looking at her expectantly. “I was listening in,” he said. “Let’s say hydrogen cyanide turns to a gas at seventy degrees. If you injected it into the firebox of the heating system, the air temp will be like one hundred degrees. It’ll stay hot all the way through the ducts and blow right out into all the rooms in the building. You’re guaranteed to deliver plenty of gas that way.”

Nancy squinted thoughtfully at the blank computer screen. “Yeah, but how would those two guys get into the Capitol at all? How could they get access to the heating system?”

Hank reached over her shoulder and tapped the keys. She couldn’t help noticing that he smelled like woodsmoke and aftershave. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell at all.

“You ever heard of Google?” Hank said with a wry smile.

On the screen the first entry on the list of entries pulled up by the search engine read:

PRESS RELEASE: National Heat & Air Conditioning, a subsidiary of Wilmot Industries, was this year awarded the contract to refurbish the aging HVAC system of one of America’s most famous buildings, the United States Capitol. The Capitol has been rebuilt several times since its inauguration on . . .”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Nancy said.

Suddenly she understood why the buildings in Wilmot’s little manufacturing complex contained such massive heating and air-conditioning equipment . . . and why the room in which the workers lived had been so large. It was a test facility, probably an exact duplicate of the House chamber and the HVAC unit that served it. That’s why the place smelled of cyanide. They’d tested it on the workers, injecting the hydrogen cyanide into the heating system, and then watched the workers die.

It made her sick to her stomach.

Nancy had been suspended and her FBI computer privileges revoked. But any security system was only as good as the people who used it. Dahlgren had given her his password when he was on the road and needed her to follow up on certain things. She was sure he wouldn’t have thought about changing it.

She accessed the FBI Web site and intranet, then typed in the remote log-in sequence. When prompted, she entered Dahlgren’s name and password. It worked perfectly. Then she logged into VORTEX, the huge database that drew on vast quantities of data resources throughout the government and the private sector.

Within minutes she had a track on Special Agent Shanelle Klotz. Every single agent carried a GPS tracking device in his field radio. She superimposed a map of the Capitol on top of the GPS coordinates. Tiny glowing red dots indicated each of the agents. She tagged Agent Shanelle Klotz. One of the glowing dots turned from blue to red.

She zoomed in. Klotz appeared to be in the office of the speaker pro tempore of the House. Then something occurred to her. Maybe she was looking at the wrong floor. She switched to Basement 1. Now Special Agent Klotz was in the men’s bathroom.

Nancy tried Basement 2.

And there it was: She was in the HVAC Access Room.

“That’s it,” she whispered.

“Now you just have to get them inside,” Hank Adams said.

Her fingers flew over the keys. Ten minutes. She had ten minutes to come up with a plan.

50

WASHINGTON, DC

The president of the United States, Erik Wade, nodded to the head of his security detail, Supervising Agent Karl Utrecht. “Ready,” he said.

Utrecht nodded at his team. “Let’s go.”

The team barely needed instructions or commands. Every member had spent hundreds of hours in training, thousands of hours on the job, and was a veteran agent with at least a decade of experience in protecting high-value principals. They were a well-oiled machine.

As the president walked out of the Oval Office, his team moved around him—calling in whispered tones for elevators and cars and doors to be opened, checking hallways and windows for potential threats, cutting off angles, clearing hallways. The team acted so efficiently and seamlessly that President Wade was nearly unaware of their presence. Other than the twenty-three seconds it took for the elevator to descend to the first floor, he never had to break stride.

Doors simply opened, guards appeared and disappeared, and at the front door to the White House, his wife, Grace, joined him, slipping into place, like one of the Blue Angels sliding into formation at an air show.

It took one minute and forty-one seconds to get from the Oval Office to the door of the limo. The door to the armored Cadillac limousine opened, and the president entered. A second limo, the decoy, slid up behind it. The door opened and an agent of similar size and build to the president entered and sat down, and that door, too, closed.

With that, the motorcade took off down the curved driveway onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and the entire convoy was in motion.

At the precise moment when President Wade began his trip toward the Capitol, the sergeant at arms of the House was announcing the entry of the Honorable Christine Harris Minor, Supreme Court justice. The former attorney general of Missouri and an experienced politician, she paused to shake hands with every single member of Congress on the aisle leading to her seat.

The sergeant at arms whispered to his assistant, “How we doing?”

“Jesus Christ, if you put a talking dog on the aisle, that woman would have shaken its paw,” his assistant said. “We’re running four and a half minutes behind.”

“Get outside and hurry these windbags along. I don’t want the president out there sitting in the limousine picking his teeth, okay?”

“Madam Speaker!” the sergeant at arms called. “The chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Honorable Edison Lockhardt.”

Edison Lockhardt had not only been a distinguished legal scholar, but he had also been the governor of New Jersey and as such he refused to be one-upped by the most liberal member of the court. As a result, he made a point to take even more time and to extend his arm even deeper into the thicket of legislators, leaving no hand ungrasped.

The sergeant at arms scowled. If his luck held, the show was going to run a good fifteen minutes late. God, he hated politicians. Sometimes he wondered if he hadn’t gone into the wrong line of work.

“Madam Speaker!” he called. “The Honorable FranciCou
qle Francis X. Dugan, Junior . . .”

51

WASHINGTON, DC

They dropped officer Millwood at the Foggy Bottom Metro station. He promised he wouldn’t turn them in, but even if he did, they would be at the Capitol before he could reach anyone. Getting inside, however, was a different matter.

“What now?” asked Tillman. “The mall’s going to be completely sealed, and those Secret Service guys don’t fool around.”

As if in answer to his question, Gideon’s newest burner began to ring. It was Nancy.

“What have you got for me?”

“Tunnels,” she said.

“Which tunnels?”

“I’ve hacked into the Secret Service computer,” she said. “You’ve got a pass waiting for you at the parking garage of the Russell Building. You both have clearance, but only for the perimeter. The Russell Building has a subway that goes to the Capitol. But there are two older tunnels. One is the old subway tunnel, which was replaced in the late 1960s with a bigger tunnel, and the other is a ventilation and mechanical tunnel that runs above it. Well, it’s more like a duct than a tunnel, really. You’ll kinda have to crawl.”

“If you can get us into the parking garage, why not into the Capitol?”

“It doesn’t work like that. All of the Capitol access is on a secure, nonnetworked computer that I can’t get into.”

“So, we’ll have to find a way to get past the final security checkpoints?”

“Yes,” said Nancy. “What I can tell you is Agent Klotz is in the HVAC Access Room, which is on the second subbasement level of the Capitol. I believe they will try to inject the cyanide in a liquid form into the heating system. The liquid will vaporize and spread through the building via the heating system, killing more or less everybody in the building. What I don’t understand is how they’re planning to get out.”

“They’re not,” Gideon said. “They’ll have to trigger it manually. All radio signals will be jammed.”

It was a sobering thought. People who planned their own deaths were the hardest to stop. A man willing to give his life for something he believed in didn’t offer much room for negotiation.

“Once you reach the Capitol, you won’t be able to contact me,” said Nancy. “I can get you to the Russell Building. But once you’re inside, you’ll be on your own.”

“Got it,” Gideon said.

“There’s one more thing you should know.” She hesitated, glancing at the TV that played C-SPAN behind her. “Your fiancée is inside.”

“Kate?” Gideon was stunned. “What the hell is she doing there?”

“inggggggggg t‡She’s with the secretary of the interior.”

He knew Kate had been working with Secretary Fitzgerald on the Deepwater commission, but he was momentarily stunned by the irony that she had accepted an invitation to attend the State of the Union address with him. That she was now at ground zero for the attack filled him with dread.

“Nancy, you have to get her out of there.”

“I don’t have any way to reach her.”

“Figure something out. You must know someone inside. Give her this number. Tell her to call me.”

“There is one agent I can trust . . .”

In her voice, Gideon heard her willingness to help and knew that their own relationship had reached a new level of understanding. Nancy had set aside whatever lingering resentment remained in order to achieve their common goal.

“Thank you, Nancy,” he said.

“Good luck.”

Gideon disconnected and explained to Tillman what Nancy had told him.

“You okay?” Tillman asked.

“Yeah. But if we can’t sneak or brazen our way through, we’re going to have to mount an assault on the Capitol—something so over the top that it would force them to evacuate the building . . . or at least recheck all their security precautions.”

“You’re talking about some kind of suicide attack.”

Gideon nodded. “Kate is in there. If I can’t stop Wilmot and get her out. I won’t have a choice. But you don’t have to come with me.”

“Are you kidding? Of course I’m coming with you. I’m your brother.”

“I know how the government treated you. You don’t owe those people a thing—especially not your life.”

“Gideon, the truth is I would come with you even if you weren’t my brother. I may not seem like much of a patriot anymore, but I still love this country, and I’m not going to let a pair of wackos kill a bunch of innocent people. But most of all, I’m not going to let them kill you or my future sister-in-law. Not if I can help it.”

Gideon regarded Tillman’s lined and tired face, so different from his own, and yet so familiar. “Thank you,” he said, brimming with gratitude.

“Now let’s go blow up some shit.”

Gideon snaked around the bombproof barriers at the Russell Building parking garage entrance. When they pulled into the lot, a Capitol police officer checked their IDs wordlessly, punching them into the computer that held the list of people who were cleared to park there that evening.

Gideon’s heart was pounding as the officer yawned and then stared at the screen. For all he knew the computer could be networked into whatever system listed them as wanted by the FBI.

But apparently the computer was just for parking clearances. The bored officer waved them through and went back to reading Teigthehe Washington Post.

The parking garage was nearly full.

“Just leave it here,” Tillman said once they’d wound down to the level of the tunnel connecting them to the Russell Building.

Gideon pulled up next to the elevators and climbed out of the car. He was still wearing his tactical gear.

According to Nancy, the entrance to the tunnel lay through a door near the elevator bank. Two heavily armed guards stood beside the door.

“Talk or shoot?” Tillman said.

“Talk,” Gideon said. “If we start shooting right off the bat, everybody goes on high alert and we’re screwed.”

“Agreed,” Tillman said.

“Follow my play.”

As soon as Gideon got within earshot of the guards, he began talking loudly into his cell phone. “Yes, ma’am, I realize that. I realize . . . Yes, ma’am. I’ll be there in less than three minutes, I promise.” He ignored the two guards and walked straight toward the door.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” one of the guards yelled. “Stop right there.”

Gideon waved irritably at the agent with the back of his hand, as though he were more concerned with whoever he was speaking to on the phone. But he stopped walking. “Yes, ma’am, I realize that. I’m already at the checkpoint in the Russell Building. If you could just . . . Right . . . right . . . right.”

“Who the hell are you?” The guard raised his P90 and was pointing it at Gideon. “Stop right there!”

Gideon rolled his eyes. “Just a moment, ma’am.” He put his hand over the phone. “Agents Dillard and Koons,” he said to the guard. “State Department Security. I’m talking to the secretary of state.”

“What?” the guard said incredulously.

“Some kind of SNAFU. The labor secretary’s security is being held up at the door, and I have to get in there and straighten out the credential situation.”