Bobkova sat up a little straighter on her park bench, willing her leg not to bounce with nervous energy. Arlington was crawling with police and federal agents. Dozens of them were sure to emerge from the woodwork like termites at the sound of a shot. She wanted to be gone before anyone knew she’d been here.
“CAROUSEL is still stationary,” Special Agent Soong said from inside Morton’s. Several less flattering code names for Chadwick had been suggested, but Montgomery reminded the team that these things had a way of coming to light and stuck with CAROUSEL.
“Alpha is stationary,” said the Secret Service agent on top of the Crystal Place apartments. She lay belly-down behind her Remington 700 rifle, peering through the reticle of a Nightforce scope, cheek against the adjustable comb of the Accuracy International chassis.
“Stay on her, Christie,” Montgomery heard Ayers say.
Special agents Miller and Woodruff responded next.
“Bravo still stationary.”
“Charlie still stationary.”
Alone in his maroon Dodge Durango two hundred meters away, Montgomery nodded to himself. He’d liked to have thought the team would have snapped to these threats simply because of their appearance, but he knew the real reason was a friendship that went back to his first days in the Service.
The baby agent who’d sat next to him at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center during basic criminal investigator school — CI, they called it — had been convinced even in the early nineties that technical measures were the future of law enforcement. Josh Parker had carried around folders crammed full of data on what was then extremely new technology regarding cell phones, digital cameras, and the emerging Internet. He was always eager to share his ideas with anyone willing to listen. Montgomery, who even then looked like a ham-fisted Mickey Spillane character with a clothing allowance and better haircut, had a tendency to depend more on shoe leather than on binary code. But he’d sensed this agent-trainee was onto something. He and Parker became good friends throughout the weeks of CI and then the more specialized Secret Service training course in Beltsville. Special Agent Parker had eventually gone on to head the Secret Service’s Protective Intelligence Division, working behind the frosted windows on the uppermost floor of Secret Service HQ.
Parker’s drone had provided the first lead.
Strictly speaking, the fifteen-mile circle around Reagan Airport was a No Drone Zone. There’d already been an incident where a small commercial UAV had crashed onto the White House lawn. Few things beyond actual gunfire got the Secret Service quite as animated as remotely piloted aircraft flying up to the window of the President’s house. The Service conducted numerous tests, working on methods to stop intrusive aircraft, and coincidentally, how they might employ such aircraft themselves in furtherance of their mission.
Josh Parker headed the research.
He’d launched his newest drone from a park two blocks away from Chadwick’s apartment, simply to get some up-to-date aerial video of the neighborhood, possible surveillance vehicles, anything out of the ordinary. He’d suggested launching the drone every hour to look for patterns — and changes in those patterns.
The drone went up for the third time at five minutes after six o’clock, just in time to watch a brunette woman exit the back side of the apartment building across the street from Senator Chadwick’s residence and get into a forest-green Ford Taurus. That would not have been abnormal at all, but for the fact that the woman got in the car and did not drive away. Two minutes later, a white male in his twenties came out of the same building but walked to a different sedan. He and the woman pulled away at the same time, heading in the same direction.
Parker had taken his drone up another hundred feet and watched the two vehicles drive out of the neighborhood. They jumped on I-66 heading east. The departure would simply have been logged by the command post, but a third male, this one shorter, darker, and older — one of the agents called him “shifty”—came out the back door of the same apartment building and drove away using the same route.
Chadwick left her residence just before six-thirty with her assistant Corey Fite behind the wheel of her Beemer. Seven U.S. Secret Service vehicles trailed, loose enough not to be seen, close enough not to lose one of the most ubiquitous types of vehicle inside the Beltway. She’d stopped and picked someone up at the Clarendon Metro Station Kiss and Ride lot, and then continued on Clarendon Boulevard, generally paralleling the route taken by the three people who’d left shortly before her.
Parker uploaded pertinent sections of the video with the clearest images of each person and sent it to everyone on the detail. The angles weren’t ideal, but they were good enough that the “shifty” guy was identified sitting on a bench inside the Crystal City Underground almost as soon as the team arrived on scene.
Montgomery and the others hadn’t known where Chadwick was going before she arrived at the steakhouse, so it took them a few minutes to get set up. One agent followed the senator and her male companion inside. This agent, a female who’d be able to check on the women’s restroom without being questioned, quietly displayed credentials identifying her as Secret Service Special Agent Madeline Soong, and told the maître d’ that she needed to conduct an advance for a visiting dignitary. Protective details were common in and around Washington, so the maître d’ gave her the run of the place. The lighting inside the restaurant was dim and Special Agent Soong, dressed in a smart navy-blue suit with an open-collar button-down, blended in with management. Chadwick was self-absorbed enough that she paid no attention to the intense Asian woman checking for would-be threats not twenty feet away.
Shifty’s presence on the bench just outside Morton’s was enough for Montgomery to put shooters on top of the nearest apartment buildings to the north and south across Crystal Drive. He wanted coverage of the drop-off and pickup point with two long guns as well as two sets of eyes. Parker’s drone would have come in handy here, but the proximity to Reagan Airport made that problematic.
Agents on the ground identified the younger man and the woman from Chadwick’s neighborhood before the snipers made it to the rooftops. They were given designators that corresponded to the order in which they’d come out of the apartment. All senses humming now, Montgomery couldn’t help but wonder if there was some unidentified Delta out there to go with his Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.
Soong’s voice came across the radio. “CAROUSEL is imminent departure. They’re paying the bill now.”
“Okay, boys and girls,” Special Agent Ayers said. “On your toes.”
43
Montgomery clutched the steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward, fighting the urge to get involved.
Chadwick’s BMW X5 pulled up just before she walked out.
“Movement, Bravo,” an agent said.
Another piped in. “Charlie’s up, walking toward the street.”
Then: “Gun Bravo! Gun Bravo!”
In front of the restaurant, Delray Witherspoon, a six-foot-three rawboned special agent who’d played tight end for Mizzou before joining the Service, bounced Bravo’s head off a concrete pillar before he could bring up the pistol. Bravo collapsed on the sidewalk.
Special Agent Soong moved to her right, body-checking subject Charlie at the moment he tried to come through the glass doors, knocking him back into the arms of the two agents who’d sprinted up behind him.
Chadwick and her date got into the Beemer and drove away, seemingly none the wiser that she’d narrowly avoided execution.