Resurrection Day (49 page)

Washington, DC 7.10 a.m.

Kursk sat in the waiting room. He was ravaged by exhaustion, but as he looked around at the family and friends of the injured — black and white, young and old, among them a couple of anxious wives with young children — his fatigue seemed unimportant.

The last eight hours had seemed a nightmare. As Morgan had dropped him off at the FBI apartment on 7th Street, they'd heard the roar of the explosion three blocks away. By the time they'd sped back to FBI Headquarters, 10th Street was in chaos.

Street lighting had been knocked out, fires raged in the darkness, and in the centre of the road huge plumes of smoke poured from the twisted and mangled skeleton of a truck. The front of the FBI HQ and several buildings across the street had been devastated by an enormous explosion, with hundreds of windows shattered. Part of the Hoover's facade had been blown away, and clumps of concrete were scattered everywhere. It looked like a scene from war-torn Beirut. And then came the screaming sirens of ambulances, fire engines and police cars.

Kursk followed a frantic Morgan into the FBI building via the undamaged Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, but rescue workers ordered them back. Then they picked their way through the mounds of street debris, Morgan flashing his ID at firefighters and police who blocked their path, until they reached the restaurant at the corner of 10th and E Street. Even before they got there, they saw the damage: the building's plate-glass windows had shattered, the facade and window frames were ablaze. A fire-fighting crew was hosing down the flames as dazed survivors were being led or stretchered out of a side entrance by paramedic crews. Collins, the woman and her child were among them.

All three were alive. Collins' face was covered with blood, and he was barely conscious as he was stretchered towards a fleet of ambulances. The woman and the little boy came next, and they looked much worse: the woman was comatose, bleeding from a severe head wound. The little boy was pitiful, his face and clothes lacerated, his eyelids closed and his breathing laboured. When his chest heaved and he coughed up blood, Kursk saw two of the paramedics exchange concerned looks that seemed to say: This one might not make it.

The ambulances sped off, and to Kursk the rest was a frantic blur: rescue workers escorted them to Pennsylvania Avenue, where survivors had been evacuated to an emergency holding point. Morgan got on his cellphone to his superiors, desperate to find out what he could about the blast. Legions of firefighting crews and police kept pouring into 10th Street. And then Kursk saw specialist FBI teams arrive, setting up powerful arc lamps and readying their equipment, preparing to comb the smouldering rubble and the mangled wreckage.

Finally, after 1 a.m., Morgan dropped an exhausted Kursk off at the FBI apartment before heading for George Washington Hospital. Kursk offered to join him, but Morgan shook his head. 'No point in us both waiting around the hospital. I'll call if I've got any news. Try and get some sleep.'

Morgan sped away in the Ford, blue light flashing. It was another hour before a restless Kursk could attempt to sleep after thirty-six hours without rest his body was on the edge of collapse — but even so he kept waking in a cold sweat. Such a savage, indiscriminate act of violence as a massive truck bomb went beyond Nikolai Gorev's modus operandi. It wasn't like him. It wasn't the kind of tactic he'd used or condoned in the past.

But what if Collins was right? What if he'd finally overstepped the mark?

Morgan came back down the hall. With him was Murphy, the head of the Counter-Terrorist Division. Kursk stepped out of the waiting room. Murphy looked bleak, nodded. 'Major.'

'Can I see Collins? How is he?'

'A little rocky right now. Apart from the injuries he suffered, he's reasonably OK physically. But he's pretty shaken about what happened to Nikki and her son. He's hoping to speak with one of their medical team just as soon they're through. So maybe if you could give it a little while before you go see him?'

From the desolate look on Murphy's face, Kursk had the feeling he was about to hear bad news. 'Is something wrong?'

Murphy glanced anxiously at Morgan, then said to Kursk, 'I think we need to have a talk, Major. Something's happened you'll need to know about.'

Washington, DC 13 November

The two FBI agents hadn't slept in almost twenty hours. As they turned their unmarked Chevy Impala on to 14th Street, cruising past the lines of hookers and drug peddlers huddled in littered store alcoves to keep out of the cold, it was almost 2 a.m. Working non-stop since seven the previous morning, with coffee and junk food to keep them awake, they had scoured their beat all night, calling on pimps and petty criminals, putting out bait money to informers and showing the photographs in the hope of getting a lead on the three known suspects.

But like the other almost three hundred federal agents from the Washington field office scouring DCs underworld with the same purpose, they hadn't come up with a single worthwhile lead. The agent who was driving yawned. 'So who's next?' His companion checked the list. 'Benny Visto.'

'That's what I like about this job — you get to keep the best of company.' The driver sighed, took an envelope containing the suspects' photographs from the side pocket of his seat and nodded to his colleague. 'OK, pull in near Visto's place and let's see what the little asshole's got to say.'

'What you mothers want, calling at this hour? Fuck's up, man?'

The FBI agent regarded the sleazy, tattooed figure of Ricky Cortez as he would a piece of shit. 'I need to talk with Benny. Get him for me.'

'Ain't here.' Cortez, standing at the open door, dressed only in jeans, pulled on his shirt.

'Where is he?'

'Don't know, motherfucker.'

'Talk to me like that again and that tongue of yours is going to be stuck up your ass.' The agent stepped into Visto's penthouse suite, his colleague behind him, hands on his hips, displaying the holstered Glock, just to let Cortez know they meant business. The suite was empty except for the Cuban and a young girl wearing a silk dressing gown who lay on Visto's bed. A hooker, the agent guessed, one of Cortez's fringe benefits.

'So where's Benny?'

'Tol' you. Don't know. Man's busy, comes and goes. Could be back early, could be back late. Benny ain't got no fixed schedule. He don't keep to no fucking timetable.'

The agent opened the envelope, held out the photographs. 'Ever see any of these people before, Ricky?'

Cortez glanced sullenly at the first shot, of an Arab, and didn't even bother to look at the rest. 'Naw.'

'Take a good look, Ricky.'

'The fuck for? I got some ass waiting, want to get back to bed.'

'Look, Ricky.'

Cortez, still sullen, barely gave the photographs a glimpse. 'Naw, ain't seen any of those mothers before.'

The agent glared back, put the shots back in the envelope. 'You've been real helpful, Ricky. How about you tell Benny to call me, soon as he gets back.'

Ricky's pit-bull eyes narrowed. 'The fuck for?'

' 'Cause it's important. And tell him if he doesn't, our deal's off.'

George Washington Hospital Washington, DC 7.15 a.m.

Collins sat alone on the end of the hospital bed, wearing a gown, his ribs hurting, his head in his hands. His face was cut and bruised, covered with gauze and plaster to mask the stitches over his left eye and on his right cheek, and there was a bald patch where the doctors had cut the hair on his scalp to suture a three-inch head gash. Two of his ribs were cracked, his chest was tightly bandaged, and it hurt when he took a deep breath. His mind was a total blank as it struggled with the situation.

After the doctor and nurse had attended to him in ER, after they'd taken the X-rays and given him the painkillers, at about 3 a.m. he'd drifted off to sleep for a couple of hours, but not wanting to sleep, wanting only to know how Nikki and Daniel were. His mind fought the lethargic effect of the drug but his body couldn't. When he woke it was 5 a.m. He was drowsy, in pain, and when the nurse came in he tried to get up out of bed, asking her about Nikki and Daniel.

'You stay right where you are, you hear?' The woman was friendly, but businesslike. 'They're in good hands. But you get some more sleep now. The surgeon's going to come by and talk to you later. You ain't doing anyone no good getting up out of that bed.'

He'd tried to sleep some more, but he kept waking, agonising over Nikki and Daniel, running the nightmare scene at the restaurant over and over in his mind. The powerful hurricane whoosh of the explosion raging in on them with a fierce intensity. The vaguely recalled sight of Nikki and little Daniel being blown off their feet by the force of the blast, before Collins struck his head and torso against something that felt like a concrete wall and was swallowed up by darkness, coming to in the hospital. He was still thinking about it when the door opened and Morgan appeared with Tom Murphy.

For half an hour, they filled him in on the events in the White House that led up to the explosion, and when Morgan left them alone to go get some coffee, Murphy explained about the new deadline, that the rules of the game had changed. Collins was even more shaken. Thirty-six hours.

'Right this minute it's closer to twenty-eight,' Murphy said dourly.

Collins thought: We haven't a hope in hell. 'Where have we got with the hunt?'

'Precisely nowhere.'

There had been many things to run down, but all of them had ended in blank walls, Murphy admitted. 'We'll try and trace the explosive materials used in the blast, but time's a constraint. There's zilch with the suicide driver's real identity, zilch from our people out trawling the streets. And the check on properties in the zone around the Maryland crime scene has drawn a blank up to now. Same with the hospitals and doctors — no one matching Gorev's description has shown up anywhere. And it's the same story with pretty much every avenue we've gone down — zilch '

'What about Rashid's apartment?'

'He never used the phone line that was installed, and left nothing lying around that might throw us a lead. The guy was careful, very professional. He paid the rent in cash through a local bank, but didn't keep any account there. His Explorer turned up nothing either, except his prints, and Gorev's and the woman's. The names Rashid used when he bought the jeep and rented the warehouse were fakes. The same with the Ryder van. The only progress we've made is finding the woman's fingerprints on the Honda and the Explorer, which prove it's her.

'We got details on her background — she's American born of Palestinian parents, and went back with them to live in Lebanon when she was twelve. We've got two dozen agents from the New York field office checking out her family's old address in Queens and trying to find out if there are any relatives or friends Stateside she might still be in touch with, or tried to get in touch with recently. But my gut feeling is we'll be wasting our time. With her kind of background and training, I'm betting she wouldn't be dumb enough to expose herself by going anywhere near an old family address, or making contact with a relative in the US, unless she was in really deep trouble and on the run, and was faced with no other choice. She'd know they're the first places we'd look. But if any relatives or friends do turn up, we'll put them under watch.' Murphy sighed. 'Apart from that, we're pretty much nowhere.'

Morgan came back, and when he and Murphy left together, Collins sat there in despair. He knew that the difficulty of finding any terrorist cell was inversely proportional to its size: the smaller the cell the harder it was to find. And experience told him that this sort of case either cracked open in days or took weeks or months. Except they hadn't got months. They had twenty-eight hours.

It was the hopelessness of the situation, and the thought of Nikki and Daniel, which brought him close to tears. Which made him question what kind of people would be prepared to commit suicide by detonating a powerful truck bomb in the heart of a city. Who would murder innocent victims — maim a defenceless woman like Nikki and a three-year-old, helpless child like Daniel — just to make a point. But he knew the answer. The same kind of callous, brutal people who had killed Sean, and when he lingered on that thought, when it reopened the angry wound of his own bitter pain, his mind flooded with rage. He didn't just imagine the bruised and bloodied faces of Nikki and Daniel; he saw the dead faces of Sean and Annie, remembered the anguish and loss of their passing, the utter futility of their deaths. And remembering that loss, he could barely hold back the tears. Then the door opened again, and a doctor stepped in.

He wore a green paper gown and green booties over sneakers. The gown was bloodstained. He didn't look more than thirty-five. His face was dark with stubble, and the name tag on his gown said: Dr Bill Wolensa. Collins tried to stand but his legs felt weak. The doctor waved for him to remain seated and slumped into a chair at the end of the bed.

'I'm Bill Wolensa. I've been working on Nikki and Daniel.' He spoke without emotion, his voice flat, and Collins saw that the young surgeon was close to exhaustion. 'OK, the story is, Nikki's fine. She had a lacerated lower left arm, a couple of nasty cuts on her legs, and a few bumps and lacerations on her head that caused a fair amount of bleeding. As with you, the injuries caused some concussion. But we did a scan and there's no brain damage or serious cranial injury, so she's going to be OK. Nothing to worry about there.'

Collins felt a surge of relief. Nikki's going to be OK. 'Will there be any permanent damage?'

'I doubt it. The cuts and wounds were pretty routine, so they should heal OK. Right now, she's sleeping, but in a day or two at most and she'll be up and about, and on her way to being discharged.'

Collins nodded, afraid to ask the next question. The doctor sighed before going on. Collins thought: Here's the bad news.

'Her son, however, is a very ill little boy.'

Collins choked back his emotion. A knot of steel gripped his stomach. 'How ill?'

'He was thrown very hard by the force of the blast. That can happen when kids are caught up in an explosion — their body weight's so slight they get tossed around a lot more than an adult. Anyway, Daniel got thrown around pretty bad. He obviously struck his chest against something — maybe wood or metal, we can't be sure. All of his right-side ribs are broken, and three on the left side, so he had a failed chest. He can't breathe for himself and he's on a respirator. He arrived here with serious internal injuries and haemorrhaging, and pretty severe damage to the spleen and the large bowel. We had to remove part of the bowel, twenty centimetres, and part of the spleen, but we're undecided about removing the rest of it right now, even though it probably needs to be done.'

'Why?'

'His heart stopped right after he got here, most likely because of loss of blood volume. We got it going again, stemmed the haemorrhaging, and started replacing the blood loss. At the moment, he's stabilised, but he's weak and in a critical condition, so a serious op like taking out the rest of his spleen would be tough on his body. How he responds over the next eight to twelve hours is pretty much going to decide how we proceed, whether we remove the rest of the organ or not.'

'Would he live OK without it?'

'Sure. The spleen's an important part of the body's defence against infections, but people can get by without one.' Wolensa hesitated. 'The ribs, that's painful, but it's not life threatening. His chest took the main impact, and the spleen damage is the main problem. He has concussion, but we can't see any evidence of internal cranial bleeding. We'll be keeping a close watch on him over the coming hours.'

Collins' stomach tightened again. 'There's nothing else you can do?'

'Nothing, I'm afraid, until we see how he responds.' Wolensa stood, exhausted, leaned a hand against the wall. 'Mr Collins, I can imagine what you must be going through, and what the boy's mother is going to go through when she regains consciousness and hears about her son, but if the paramedics had got Daniel here five minutes later, I have to tell you, he'd be dead by now. So at least there's hope. The medical staff here are among the best, and I can assure you we'll be doing everything we possibly can. Not only for Daniel, but for all the others injured in the explosion.'

Wolensa rubbed his fingers into tired eyes, moved to the door, opened it. 'And now, if you'll excuse me, I still have to check on my other patients. It's been a difficult night, as you can understand. We've haven't just had Nikki and Daniel to deal with.'

'Can I see them?'

'No.' Wolensa shook his head. 'Both of them are in the critical care unit right now. We don't allow visitors. The smallest infection can be lethal in the unit, and in Daniel's case, a damaged spleen can leave him open to infection. I'm sorry, but it would be too dangerous. Our staff are watching them constantly and are never more than a few feet away if things go wrong — and it's quite common for things to go wrong with seriously injured victims so it's better if there's no one to get in the way.'

'When can I see them?'

Wolensa lingered at the open door. 'Give it another eight hours at least, then you can see Nikki. By then we ought to have moved her out of critical care. But the little boy ... that may take a little longer.'

'Couldn't I just see Nikki right now?'

'Not a chance.'

Collins closed his eyes. Could he wait another eight hours? He had no choice.

'You're not the boy's father, are you?' Wolensa said. 'At least, that was what I was told.'

'No.'

Wolensa sighed again. 'Look, let me be frank here. The child might die. It's as stark as that. He's been through hell — he's wired up to a respirator, his body's been bruised, bloodied, battered and operated on, and he's heavily bandaged and got IV tubes and monitor wires hanging out of him. Would you want to remember him like that?'

Collins shook his head, distressed. 'What are his chances?'

'I'm not a bookie, Mr Collins. I never quote odds. And besides, they're irrelevant in this case. Either he makes it or he doesn't. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but that's how it is.' Wolensa suddenly looked behind him. A man stood in the open doorway. The doctor turned back to Collins. 'I think you've got a visitor waiting. I'll leave you in peace.'

Collins saw Kursk standing right outside the door. Wolensa started to leave then hesitated, a look of sympathy on his weary face. 'Look, if you really want, you can take a look at them through the glass front in the critical-care rooms. That's about the best I can offer right now.'

Kursk stepped into the room after Wolensa had gone. 'I heard what the doctor said about your friend's little boy. I'm sorry.'

Collins nodded grimly. 'Did Murphy fill you in?'

'Yes.'

'He says you were right about the woman. At least that's something. But we're still nowhere, Kursk.' Collins got up off the bed shakily, his chest hurting. He put a hand on a chair to support himself. Kursk went to help, but Collins said, 'No need, I'm OK.'

'You should stay in bed.'

'That's the last place I'm going to stay.' A steely look galvanised Collins' face. The door opened. Morgan came in, carrying a black plastic bag. 'I got them, Jack.'

Collins opened the bag, took out his bloodstained clothes. Kursk was puzzled. 'What are you doing?'

'First, I'm going to go home to change, have a shower and try and get another couple of hours' rest. Then I'm going to get back to work. We've got twenty-eight hours to crack this thing. Maybe we haven't got a hope in hell of finding Rashid, Gorev and the woman, or stopping them in time. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. But that doesn't mean we're not going to give it our best shot, right up to the deadline. Are you with us, Kursk?'

'Yes.' Kursk looked at him. 'What about your injuries?

'I can walk and talk, and that's enough. Give me ten minutes, then I'll meet you two out front.'

Morgan said, 'You sure you'll be OK, Jack?'

'Ten minutes.'

Kursk and Morgan took the elevator to the ground floor. As they came out into the lobby, Kursk said, 'Will you excuse me? I need to find a rest room.'

'Sure. I'll go get the car. Meet you outside when you're ready.' Morgan stepped out through the exit doors.

A minute later, having stopped off at reception, Kursk wandered along a hallway off the lobby until he found the rest rooms, but didn't step inside. For a second or two he hesitated, troubled by what he had to do, but knowing it was his duty. Then he took the cellphone from his pocket and punched in a private number at the Russian embassy.