Lt. Samuel Calvin of the Texas Highway Patrol Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division lowered his hands as the choppers took off. Behind his dark aviator glasses his blue eyes remained fixed on the Ospreys, with a look that was somewhere between contempt and amusement.
“Everyone stand down!” he said, half turning and shouting over his shoulders. “Except you, Munson.”
“Yes, sir, Chief.”
The men got to their feet, stretching cramped legs. They lowered their weapons, reached for bottled water, and stood at ease. Only Letty Munson remained where she was. She was still crouched, watching the retreating Ospreys through her binoculars, shielding them with one hand so the lenses wouldn’t catch and reflect the sun.
“Doesn’t look like they’re taking any action,” she reported. “Those boys are headed home.”
Calvin nodded. Low on his to-do list was hanging around-let alone walking over to the van-as the choppers cut loose with incendiary ordnance of some kind.
“You were right, Lieutenant,” said the other man.
“Appears so.”
The two officers were standing behind the Trask Industries vehicle, one man on either side, their crisp light brown uniforms stained with perspiration under the armpits and around the collar.
“They follow orders like they were written by the finger of God Himself,” the thirty-one-year-old said. “Sent for two individuals. They go back with two individuals.” The blue eyes lowered as he turned his sun-leathered face toward the van. “Check the cargo back, would you, Patrolman?”
“Yes, sir.”
Calvin was on the driver’s side and walked around it. People don’t always have the information you want, or else they lie, he thought with satisfaction as he approached the open door. Evidence does not.
From the moment the THP came within visual contact of the van-and the Ospreys-Calvin knew what he wanted. The van had Georgia plates. The men had been on the road awhile. Whatever they had done, whatever the navy wanted them for, it had most likely taken place during that drive. That meant the van would bear the fingerprints of whatever was at issue here. The military didn’t confiscate it because, Calvin-a veteran of four years in army intelligence-knew, HUMINT was prized above all. Get prisoners to talk. And they clearly didn’t want a showdown with the THP. Whoever was in charge of the operation snared the targets and got out.
Calvin bent and looked into the driver’s side. He saw what he expected to see: soda cans, candy wrappers, coffee cups, two newspapers, and an iPod. The GPS was still on. He checked their route. Atlanta to New York to White Sands.
They were headed there, anyway, Calvin thought. Why the rush? To keep them out of our hands, he decided.
“The bay is clean except for muddy footprints,” the officer reported.
“That’s why they were so shiny.”
“Sir?”
“The Ospreys,” he said. “They were cleaning them. Got the order to deploy real sudden.”
He grinned. High school kids at a car wash. “Thank you, Carter. Go back to the vehicle. I’ll be there in a minute.”
The patrolman left and Calvin climbed in. He took the keys; never knew what else they might open. He checked the glove compartment. No one used it for maps anymore. There was a flashlight and a small tool kit. A first-aid kit was attached to the underside of the dashboard.
There was one thing more. It was in the small compartment between the seats, along with a packet of registration material and a St. Christopher’s medallion. A cell phone, one unlike any Calvin had ever seen. He took it, and the charger, then used his Swiss Army knife to unscrew the GPS. He tucked it under his arm and went back to his own prowler. He was most curious about the phone but did not want to risk turning it on and triggering some kind of data self-destruct code in the phone’s program.
“Take us back to division,” he said to the driver. “On the double.”
The driver signaled the turnaround to the others, adding, “And put the spurs to the flanks.”
Calvin didn’t know what he had in his little trophy, but he knew that it made him smile. He imagined one of two things would happen next: the choppers would come back when HQ found out they hadn’t swept the vehicle, or they’d dispense with the vehicular pat down and toast it from the air.
Either way, Calvin scored that one for what his grandfather used to call “us Texicans.” But as the glow of their success faded, he began to wonder what was really behind the apprehension of two men who didn’t appear to have a clue what was happening. In light of what had occurred in Baltimore and New York, followed by the alert from Trask Industries, plus the emptiness of the cargo bay-it all suggested nothing good.
He hoped to have some of those answers when they reached the mobile unit in New Boston. In the meantime, he texted a brief on-site report to the division leader so that Washington could be alerted.
CHAPTER 26
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The Oval Office meeting broke at 3:00 a.m. with word that a young student at Georgetown University had been found dead in his dorm room of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was a Lebanese citizen, and an FBI uniform was found in a burning pile in the bathtub. The smoke detector was what had triggered the security guard to break in.
The only things found in the uniform were marbles.
The president grabbed a few hours’ sleep upstairs, in the master bedroom, was showered, shaved, and about to go back to work when word of the Penn Station shootings reached him. He hurried down to the Oval Office. There were no new briefing folders on the president’s desk. In situations where intel was streaming and constantly changing, updates were typically delivered by the department heads.
An intern arrived with a tray of coffee for the president. A second tray arrived and was placed on the coffee table for the others. FBI director Charles Cluzot was already there, along with Homeland Security chief Max Carlson and the CIA’s Bob Andrews. The press secretary had already convened her staff to discuss the talking points for her 10:00 a.m. appointment in the Briefing Room.
That was postponed until noon after the first sniper attack. It was postponed again indefinitely after the second attack.
National Security director Bruce Perry was also in attendance. He had flown back from London, where he had been meeting with his counterpart, Britain’s National Security advisor Sir Peter Gurney.
The Oval Office became a clearinghouse, as information was received by the three intelligence directors and shared with each other and the president. It frustrated Brenneman and the others that no larger pattern seemed to be emerging. The events in two cities appeared to be random acts of terror, albeit most likely coordinated.
“So we’ve got our FBI impostor,” Andrews said. “Another man of Arab descent with no priors and no apparent radical affiliations.”
“What still bothers me,” Carlson said, “is that no one has claimed credit for any of these. Even the guys who claim credit for everything they didn’t do were caught flat-footed.”
“Hold on a second,” the fifty-two-year-old Perry said. “This isn’t good.”
Brenneman looked over the edge of his coffee cup at the bald-headed NSD. Perry was the former director of the nonpartisan National Assured Salvation think tank based in Savannah, Georgia. His appointment had taken a lot of heat from civil rights groups because NAS was an outgrowth of the Confederate group Assured Salvation, which was responsible for evacuating civilians of all races from war zones. Though many blacks had been saved, they were saved as slaves. Many who wished to wait for the Northern troops were forced out. For Perry-and for Brenneman-the Civil War was over and population centers were prime targets for terror. That was Perry’s specialty.
Perry was not an alarmist. When he said that something wasn’t good, it was the equivalent of “Dear God in Heaven!” from other lips.