Garin disconnected and turned to the assistant. “Ma’am, thanks so much. I’ll get out of your way now. I can find my way back downstairs.” The assistant smiled and returned to her desk in the reception area. Garin walked out of the suite, the door closing automatically behind him. The eleventh floor was quiet. No one was in the hallways as Garin strode to the door next to the elevator bank. He glanced around briefly before opening the door and ascending the stairwell one flight to the rooftop of the building.
Garin took off the black-framed spectacles and put on his sunglasses as he emerged into the bright sunshine. The rooftop was flat, enclosed by a chest-high brick wall. He walked to the southern side of the building and stooped under the metal overhang of an air-conditioning unit. He leaned forward against the brick wall and looked across the alleyway that separated the NLRB building from the Hamilton Crowne Plaza.
The sidewalk in front of the hotel had the usual level of pedestrian traffic for late morning. There was no unusual activity on either Fourteenth or K Streets, or Franklin Square on the opposite side of the hotel. Garin estimated it would be no more than another five minutes before that changed.
He used the time to remove the contacts and facial molds and put on a dark blue cap and shirt retrieved from the gym bag. To anyone viewing him from a distance, he would resemble a member of a SWAT team. Garin then scanned the surrounding buildings for the location most favorable for a sniper covering the exits to the hotel, quickly concluding that the two best spots were the PNC Bank across from Franklin Square and the roof of the Tower Building on the northwest corner of Fourteenth and K. He would keep an eye on those locations.
The first sign of activity occurred a few minutes later. That didn’t take long, thought Garin. Several dark-colored vans appeared along both Fourteenth and K Streets. Two parked across the street from the hotel entrance along the northwest curb of K Street. Another parked along the southwest side of the hotel. The last one that Garin could see parked directly below him in the alley separating the NLRB building and the hotel.
Almost simultaneously, more than a dozen DC police cruisers formed a perimeter extending approximately two blocks from the hotel. Garin presumed there was also a van behind the hotel, although he couldn’t see it from his location.
The vans remained parked for a couple of minutes without anyone getting out of them. Then a nondescript dark-colored sedan pulled up behind the van parked in front of the hotel. Two men in business suits who looked to Garin as if they had just auditioned for Hollywood roles as FBI agents got out and entered the hotel. Contemporaneously, six FBI agents in SWAT gear and armed with what appeared to be MP5s followed the suits into the hotel. They would conduct the search for Garin.
The SWAT teams from the other vans Garin could see fanned out along the sidewalk to surround the hotel at equidistant intervals. D.C. police appeared and placed roadblocks at the intersections of Fourteenth and K, and Fourteenth and L, to direct traffic to two detours at Fourteenth and I and Thomas Circle. Alarmed pedestrians didn’t have to be told to get out of the way as they scrambled as far as they could from the FBI perimeter.
Garin now heard the sound of a helicopter approaching from the west. He was fairly confident the air-conditioner overhang would shield him from the view of the helicopter’s occupants but retreated slightly from the wall so that no portion of his body protruded from the shelter.
This is quite a production, thought Garin. The numbers of SWAT personnel seemed to grow even larger over the next thirty seconds. Another dark sedan was waved through the roadblock at Fourteenth and K and came to a halt in the middle of the street in front of the hotel. The passenger door opened and a figure familiar to Garin got out. He wore a dark business suit and an air of authority. His name was Jack Sakai, the head of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Garin had met him several years ago during joint training exercises at Quantico. The heavy hitters were coming out to get Garin.
The Hollywood Suits emerged from the hotel and met Sakai on the sidewalk, where they engaged in an animated discussion. As they did so, Garin checked the surrounding buildings again, leaving for last the two sniper-friendly spots he had previously identified.
Atop the Tower Building across the street a curious maintenance man watched the proceedings below. In a tenth-floor window of the adjacent office building an office worker in a white shirt and red tie did the same. Garin slowly panned to the sniper-friendly locations. He saw nothing at the first but noticed a barely perceptible anomaly at the second. On the roof of the PNC Bank building, there was what appeared to be a slight discoloration in the otherwise dark gray metal façade of a window washer’s carriage. Only a skilled observer in a position precisely level with the PNC rooftop would’ve had just the right angle and cast of light to spot the discoloration.
While keeping his binoculars trained on the anomaly, Garin adjusted the focus carefully. He then closed his eyes for several seconds to dilate his pupils. When he peered through the binoculars again he thought he could make out something that might be a man. On the other hand, it could very well be an odd-shaped blotch of faded paint on the carriage. A Rorschach test. For anyone else, it was faded paint. For Garin, it held the potential for death.
Garin ignored the activity in the street below and remained focused on the Rorschach test. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, so that his gaze remained steady. He stared at the single spot for several minutes, willing some form of movement. Nothing.
Garin remained patient. His attention stayed fixed on the Rorschach despite an urge to wipe away an annoying bead of perspiration that perched on his right eyelid. He ignored the helo circling overhead. He disciplined himself to avoid looking down at the FBI teams on the street below. And he waited. Yet the Rorschach remained unchanged.
A moment before Garin was about to end his surveillance, a thread of sunlight reflecting off the windshield of the circling helicopter splayed for a millisecond across the carriage. In that millisecond, Garin caught the unmistakable face of one of the most lethal men in the country’s arsenal of covert operators. Approximately thirty hours ago, Garin thought he’d seen that face in a field in upstate New York. Now, seeing it a second time left absolutely no doubt in Garin’s mind as to whom it belonged. Congo Knox, Delta sniper.
Sergeant Knox’s exploits and capabilities were legendary. He could hit the proverbial eye of a mosquito in a hurricane at a thousand yards and disappear while standing at attention at midfield during the Super Bowl. He had more than eighty confirmed kills and an even larger number of probables. His longest recorded kill was nineteen hundred yards, using a fifty-caliber McMillan TAC-50. A man with such skill probably considered it an insult to be assigned such an easy target. Whoever had sent him believed there could be absolutely no margin for error.
Knox’s face and form disappeared with the flash of light caused by the helicopter. Garin scanned the area immediately surrounding the carriage and saw nothing. As he had in upstate New York, Knox was probably working without a spotter.
Knox, Garin reasoned, was positioned in the hide atop the PNC Bank to take out Garin once the FBI had him in custody or, perhaps, when Garin attempted to escape from the hotel. Either way, it was clear that Knox and the FBI weren’t working in tandem. The FBI wanted Garin alive. Someone else wanted him dead. That someone was giving Knox orders.