“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?”