Douglas Pearson
Cloudburst
PROLOGUE
COMES A STORM
The calf-high, black leather boots hit the carpet with a muffled thud.
His features were dark, both hair and skin, and in the darkened room his form was specter-like. His eyes surveyed the area. It was devoid of life, as he knew it would be. To his left the slender beams of morning light which pierced the adjustable window shades were glinting off the polished table tops.
A few words were said to his comrade and then the equipment was passed down, followed by the second man, shorter than his partner. The tall one gathered his things and went to the window, carefully parting the thin metal blinds to scan the area below. The other moved to the center of the room. He put the satchel at his feet and looked up.
The first movement was visible on the street sixty feet below. The tall one let the blinds close with a metallic snap. “It is time.”
The shorter man simply nodded and pulled the loading lever back on his rifle, chambering the first round. Next, he picked up the green tube and extended the two sections. Finally, he said a silent prayer and prepared to ready the last weapon, waiting for the final word from his brother.
After a quarter century of service in the Bureau, Art Jefferson had learned to stay out of the way when the president came to town. If he had to serve as FBI liaison, the best place for him was away from the action, yet close enough to be found if any Secret Service type needed a Bureau man to answer a question. The quiet, shady spot on the north side of the pricey hotel was as far away as he could realistically be, yet it provided what he needed most at the moment: relief from the ninety-five-degree weather, which hadn’t abated in daytime for a week. A few steps behind, inside the Los Angeles Hilton, it was comfortably air-conditioned. But it was also teeming with bureaucratic bodyguards carrying Uzis in black briefcases and wearing tiny earphones at the ends of coiled wires that disappeared beneath their collars.
Art instinctively reached into his side jacket pocket, but the cigarettes weren’t there.
“Shit.” He hated the idea that he had to go without something. It wasn’t in him to admit to mortal frailties like high blood pressure and reduced lung capacity. The doctors — three of them — had told him to drop fifteen pounds and kick the habit, or he might end up like a lot of black men pushing fifty…lying in his backyard next to the lawn mower and clutching his chest. What the hell do they know? he thought.
The sun was just about to peak over the baby skyscraper to Art’s right. Even in the building-shaded downtown area the heat was already oppressive in the late morning, and the direct sunlight soon to come would only add to the discomfort. At least Art could be grateful that the hubbub of activity that always accompanied a presidential visit brought with it the disappearance of the normal Sunday traffic. It would have been light for the weekend, but that was a relative term. Light only in comparison to the weekday lines of cars on Wilshire Boulevard, a thoroughfare on the Hilton’s north side that stretched west a number of miles to the beaches of Santa Monica, but east for only another three blocks to its end at the base of the One Wilshire Building. The cars filling the street with noise and exhaust fumes on a normal day of rest would have been, at the least, annoying. On a weekday…
Art left his leaning post, one of the covered drive’s pillars, making sure to put on his mirrored sunglasses. He also nonchalantly ran his right hand up the side of his jacket. It was there. He knew it would be, but checking was a habit developed from a single incident, many years before, that had almost cost him his life. The feel of his gun was reassuring. If he never had to use it again, that was fine; if he did, he was damn sure going to be certain it was there. It was a compulsion, one he was joked about—Stroked Mr. Smith and Wesson today? — but so what?
Across Wilshire sat the Secret Service war wagons, identical black Chevy Suburbans, their windows tinted to the point of reflectiveness. In each were five armed-to-the-teeth Service agents, the Counter Assault Teams, who would respond to any call for assistance from the presidential detail leader with authorization to fire as needed to protect the chief executive. The CAT agents would just as eagerly empty their automatics into any perceived threat as they would place themselves between harm and the ‘man.’
Good work by the Secret Service and other agencies had prevented the need for using force to protect the president in the past ten years, but they knew their luck could not hold out. Terrorism had come to the States long ago, though to some it was seen only as a more violent criminal element exposing itself. The truth was more frightening. Violence was not the greatest weapon of the terrorist: Intelligence was. Brains multiplied the effect of bullets by a factor of ten. It was only a matter of time before the Service adage ‘Innocents be damned, save the man’ came to be.
Art rolled up a stick of Big Red, his cigarette surrogate, and pushed it into his mouth, getting an immediate taste of the hot cinnamon flavor. Standing curbside he looked east, to his right. Every building in the vicinity of Seventh and Figueroa, the intersection nearest where the president would exit the hotel, would have a Secret Service counter-sniper team atop or in the structure, some two. Each pair, distinctive in their mottled gray-black-white urban cammies, was a true team: one spotter with his own M-16A2 assault rifle, and one long-rifleman, master of the PSG-1, a highly accurate and hideously expensive German-made .308 sniping weapon. These teams had an extraordinary degree of latitude when it came to ‘fire or forget it’ situations, even more so than the immediate presidential detail, to the point that they alone made the decision to drop a threat. There was no waiting for the proverbial green light as in SWAT-style operations. They did not take the awesome responsibilities of their job lightly. They would do what had to be done, and God be with the bad guy on the wrong side of the cross hairs.
Art strolled easily, his hands in his pockets. His FBI shield, clipped to his black belt, was the only official ID he needed, being a ranking and easily recognizable special agent of the Bureau’s L.A. field office. His specialty was OC, organized crime investigations, an area he had worked mostly in for fifteen years, and exclusively in for the last ten in the City of Angels. In rank he was fourth in L.A., under Lou Hidalgo, Jerry Donovan, and Special Agent in Charge William Kileen. Art liked to think that the Irish blood at the top was a sign of luck, at least for himself and his fellow agents, but he also knew there was a long tradition of Irishmen in the Bureau, dating back to its beginning. There was an abundance of the people from across the sea back then, almost all sturdy, patriotic individuals who took to their new home quite well. Art’s ancestors had had no such luck in the early 1900s. Just avoiding the lynch mobs his grandmother had told him about seemed to have occupied much of their time in Alabama. He didn’t put much stock in the belief that something was owed the black man, though, instead believing that one’s true grit could be measured by exploiting his own abilities. Some called it pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Art called it having balls…and using them.
He stopped at the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa, the northeast corner of the Hilton’s block-square complex. There were a number of uniformed officers of the Los Angeles Police Department standing at several points in the intersection, some near the open-doored squad cars that blocked the streets for two blocks in all directions. Art could see, south on Figueroa, the more heavily guarded area near the presidential limousine, which was hidden from view under the south side covered drive. Numerous black and some white chase-and- lead vehicles were visible lined up through the intersection of Figueroa and Seventh. The short covered drive, with both its entrance and exit on Seventh, was totally hidden from Art’s line of sight, but he had seen it many times. It was similar to the one on the north side, though not as ornate, for lack of a better word. Anything other than his beloved, comfortable TraveLodge was ornate to Art.