Callie Stewart had grown tired of observing the watch floor from her usual perch on the catwalk, so she had taken to mingling with the military liaisons on the left side of the watch floor. Admiral DeSantos had introduced her to Colonel Hanson, SOCOM's liaison, who accepted her based on the SEAL's word. She had been able to spread her influence to a few of the technicians, even managing to cozy up to NCTC's assistant director, Karen Wilhelm. She had little ulterior motive beyond making her time in the Operations Center a little more tolerable. Of course, her eyes and ears were always open for new intelligence. Old habits were hard to break.
Over the past three days, she had mapped out the relationships between everyone on the floor, paying close attention to mannerism, posture, glances…all of the subtle, below-the-surface connections that defined the true essence of the microcosm surrounding her. She was less interested in the overt drama, since most of it was window dressing. Once she had mapped out this web of connections, she could anticipate and predict their behavior based on something as innocuous as a pair of folded arms or a stolen glance. Right now, Karen Wilhelm was annoyed. She had just placed her hands on her hips, which was one of her many "tells."
Stewart followed her glare and settled on a man she had never seen before in the Operations Center. He wore a loose blue windbreaker with some kind of yellow logo on the front. She could only read "N" from her angle, but she assumed it read NCTC. He glanced around stiffly as he tentatively approached the other side of the watch floor and started to navigate the cluster of workstations that housed most of the FBI's task force. Karen Wilhelm started walking in his direction from her desk on Stewart's side of the center. When Stewart turned her head to examine the object of Wilhelm's curiosity, she noticed that his left hand was inserted into the left bottom pocket of the windbreaker. Purely out of instinct, she started to walk briskly toward the man. Something was off.
Special Agent Mendoza prepared another cup of burnt coffee and diluted it with three Coffee-mate creamers. He figured this cup would probably give him heart palpitations, but at least that would keep him awake. The day had dragged on forever after Sharpe's revelation about cooperating with Sanderson. Knowing that they were possibly pursuing false leads, while Sanderson's people assembled in Pennsylvania, had made the exhausting process nearly unbearable. It reached a boiling point when Sharpe finally confirmed that Sergeant Osborne's past few vacation periods matched up with vacations taken by operatives killed or captured in Brooklyn. Julius Grimes, the operative caught on camera near one of the Al Qaeda safe houses, fit the same pattern. Sharpe twisted some arms behind the scenes to get Laurel's chief of police to cooperate, without drawing attention within the task force. They still wanted to keep this a secret while Sanderson's crew pursued the next lead.
He walked out of the small break room, intending to step into Sharpe's office for a few minutes, when he noticed a man wearing an NCTC windbreaker walking toward O'Reilly and Hesterman's workstation. The guy looked lost, edging his way forward. When the man reached into his left pocket, Mendoza placed his coffee on the edge of the nearest workstation desk.
What he saw next left him with little time to make an impossible decision. When the dark-haired man removed his hand from the pocket, he clutched a small, highlighter-sized object in his fist. A thin black wire extended from the bottom of the black device back into his pocket. There was little doubt in Mendoza's mind about what was hidden under the man's windbreaker. He didn't hesitate. Mendoza's Glock 23 flashed out of its holster and centered on the man's head. He heard a female voice scream "no" and something about a "dead man" right before he fired. The .40-caliber bullet struck the man at the very top of his spine, exiting through his right eye socket and turning him off like a light switch. Callie Stewart flew into view, screaming, "Don't shoot!" as the man's body crumpled to the floor. She wrapped both of her hands tightly around the limp hand holding the detonator, pulling it inward to her chest and dropping to the floor next to him. Instinctively, Mendoza aligned the Glock's sights on Stewart's head. She had her hands on the detonator.
"Drop the detonator!" he screamed.
If she didn't separate her hands immediately, he'd kill her. He only hesitated for this long because Sharpe trusted her.
"It's a dead-man switch. Don't shoot!" she screamed.
He processed her statement, wasting precious milliseconds evaluating the variables. If she was telling the truth, Callie Stewart had just saved the Operations Center from a suicide bombing. If she was lying, she had just bought herself enough time to finish the job. He had hesitated long enough for her to set off the explosives, but she didn't move. She'd been telling the truth. He started to lower his pistol. Three rapid gunshots erupted at point-blank range from the workstation next to her. The bullets struck her in the upper back and neck, spraying blood onto the dead man at her knees. He lurched forward in horror as her body wavered and fell. He never saw her hands come apart.
Special Agent O'Reilly had figuratively hit a wall with her research into the backgrounds of the eighty-five men and women they had identified from the compound raid. She didn't see any point in continuing to try to find a pattern that might help forward the investigation. Most of them had recently participated in some kind of anti-government survivalist activity, running the spectrum from bravado forum posts on anti-government-slanted websites to misdemeanor criminal harassment charges for threatening elected officials.
She didn't believe that True America would round up over a hundred of these nut jobs for a weekend recruitment drive in the middle of one of the deadliest domestic terrorist plots in U.S. history. Sergeant Osborne's vacation schedule sealed it for her. She was going through the motions until Sanderson's people gave them something substantive to investigate. All indicators pointed to Pennsylvania as their best hope of stopping True America, or at least moving the investigation closer. Unfortunately, there was little to do on their end, especially given the methods and personnel used to obtain the information. Not to mention the possibility of a True America sympathizer within the task force or NCTC. For the first time in years, she was truly frustrated by their inability to take action. She started to type a message to Sharpe on her computer, but stopped. She'd brainstormed every possible way around this and ended up empty handed. It was time to give it a rest.
She noticed Karen Wilhelm walking in her direction at an unusually fast pace. Her peripheral vision detected another rapidly moving object, which turned out to be Callie Stewart in full sprint. O'Reilly twisted her head and torso far enough around to see one of the IT guys standing less than ten feet behind her, wearing an NCTC windbreaker. She recognized the guy. Fitch. Stewart screamed, still barreling through the workstations, when Fitch's head suddenly exploded. Her face was hit by warm splatter, causing her to close her eyes and raise her hands. She heard Mendoza's voice over the deafening echo of a single gunshot, followed immediately by Stewart's frantic voice, screaming something about a dead-man switch. Three rapid gunshots drowned out Stewart's desperate plea, causing O'Reilly to reach for her own weapon. She swiveled her chair and opened her eyes. All she saw was Hesterman's massive form bent over her.
Special Agent Sharpe finished reading the last few lines of O'Reilly's initial report regarding the suspects found at the Hacker Valley compound. He completely agreed with her assessment that something didn't add up. A figure loomed in his doorway for a moment, causing him to look up from the computer screen. He saw Mendoza hover near his door with a cup of coffee and walk away. He needed to talk to Mendoza about finding a way to slip a portion of Benjamin Young's information into their investigation. He'd asked O'Reilly to come up with a few ideas, but even the craftiest agent in the building couldn't conceive of a way to do it covertly. Mendoza was his last hope.