Burn in hell, Carter, thought Stone as the door closed behind him.
And I’ll see you when I get there.
Five minutes later Stone was seated at a small wooden table inside a windowless room. He looked around the confines of the space even as he slowed his breathing and tried not to think about his pounding head. An interrogation room clearly.
And that’s what’s about to happen to me.
The room suddenly went dark and an image appeared on the wall opposite, projected there by equipment housed discreetly in the ceiling.
It was a man sitting in a cushy chair behind a polished desk. From the view Stone had over the man’s shoulder it was clear he was on a jet. He was fifty and tanned with pointy hair cut nearly to his scalp and a pair of energetic green eyes.
Before the man could speak, Stone said, “I don’t warrant a face-to-face?”
A smile edged across the fellow’s face. “Afraid not, but you do get me.”
Me was the new director of NIC, Riley Weaver. He’d taken over for the deceased Carter Gray. Those were big shoes to fill, and the word in government circles was that Weaver was slowly but surely finding his way. Whether or not that was a good thing for the country was as yet unknown.
At the sound of Weaver’s voice, the door to the room opened and two other men filed in and leaned against the wall behind Stone. Stone never liked having armed men behind him, but there was nothing he could do about that right now. He was the visiting team and the home squad made the rules.
“Debrief,” ordered Weaver, looking at Stone.
“Why?” replied Stone.
The smile slipped off Weaver’s face. “Because I asked, politely.”
“Do I work for you? I don’t remember getting that memo.”
“Just exercise your civic duty.”
Stone said nothing.
Weaver finally broke the silence. He leaned forward and said, “I understand you have fair winds and following seas at your back.”
Weaver, Stone now recalled, had been a Marine. Marines were part of the navy, and his nautical reference showed that he was tighter in the loop than Stone had expected. The president of the United States represented Stone’s “fair winds and following seas,” which in nautical parlance meant very favorable navigating conditions. But did Weaver know about his meeting with the president? About his being shipped off to Mexico to deal with the Russians? If not, Stone had no intention of enlightening him.
“Civic duty,” said Stone. “Just so we understand each other. It goes both ways.”
Weaver sat back. His features showed that while he might have underestimated Stone initially, that miscalculation had been quickly remedied. “Agreed.”
Stone succinctly gave his account of the attack in the park.
When he was done Weaver said, “All right. Now look left and observe closely.”
CHAPTER 7
A moment later Stone was watching the prior night’s video feed from Lafayette Park. They had slowed down the frame speed so that Stone could view every detail closely and unhurriedly. As the gunfire commenced, Stone watched as people started running in all directions. Perimeter security took defensive positions and looked for the source of the shots. The jogger started to run in the feeble way of a man unaccustomed to exercise. His strides were really short, increasingly weakened hops. His path carried him through the yellow tape and a few moments later he fell or he might’ve jumped into the hole where the big maple was being planted.
Now Stone could make sense of what he had seen, namely the man seemingly vanishing into thin air. It was like a foxhole, thought Stone. To get away from the bullets.
Then the explosion happened. Stone saw himself lifted off his feet and slammed into the ganger. They both went down. The tooth in his head. He rubbed the spot.
A second later, the cameras went to static. The concussive force of the blast must have jammed the signal somehow. The wall became blank again.
Weaver said, “Observations?”
“Run it again,” Stone requested.
He watched the feed twice more.
Stone thought about what he’d just seen. The jogger had tumbled into the open hole around the maple and the explosion had happened seconds later.
“So what was the source of the detonation? The jogger?”
“Not sure yet. It may have been something in that hole.”
Stone looked skeptical. “In the hole? No gas lines under the park?”
“None.”
“Then you know what you’re suggesting? A bomb planted in Lafayette Park?”
Weaver’s expression grew even darker. “The implications of that are downright paralyzing, but we can’t discount the possibility.”
“So you’re saying maybe the guy jumped into the hole to avoid the bullets and gets blown up instead by a bomb previously placed there?”
“If so, it’s really bad luck for him. He gets away from the bullets and still dies.”
“Who’s on the scene?”
“ATF and the FBI as we speak.”
Stone could understand that. The ATF handled all investigations involving explosives until it was determined that the act was one of international terrorism. Then the FBI would take over. However, Stone assumed a bomb going off across from the White House would be classified de facto as a foreign terrorist act. That meant the Bureau would take the lead. It probably already had.
Stone asked, “Okay, let’s pass over the explosion for now. Do we know the source of the shots? On the video they appeared to be coming from the northern end of the park. From the direction of H Street or perhaps past that.”
“That’s the prelim conclusion at least, yeah.”
“So running north-south. There were no muzzle flashes on the video,” Stone pointed out. “That must mean they were hidden from the camera’s eyes.”
“Behind trees,” offered Weaver. “Lot of them at the northern end of the park. But the surveillance cameras are positioned mainly for ground-level observation. So in any event they might not have picked up the flashes if the shooters were really high up.”
“Well, the shots had to come from elevated angles,” Stone opined.
“How do you figure?” asked Riley in a way that made Stone believe the man already knew the answer but was simply testing him. Stone decided to play along, for now.
“If they were fired from behind the trees at street level they most likely would have carried past the park and across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”
“How do you know they didn’t?”
“Because you would have already told me if they had or I would have heard about more casualties. There are a lot of people on the White House side. Vehicles lining Pennsylvania Avenue. Sentries doing perimeter patrols. It’s inconceivable that someone would not have been hit. So high ground to low. Fits with my observations. From what I could see, the slugs were all plowing into the dirt. And if they passed through tree canopies first, they had to be fired from at or above that line. And a lot of those trees are pretty tall with thick canopies.” Stone added, “Anyone on the northern end of the park see anything helpful?”
“There was security. Park Police, couple of uniformed Secret Service agents, bomb-sniffing canine. They’re still being debriefed, but preliminarily they didn’t have much on the source.”