Turning to look into the other man’s face, Kealey could do nothing more than hope to God he
was right.
“Trust me, it’s almost over.”
When Jonathan Harper went looking for Kealey in the early afternoon at Tyson’s Corner, he
found him seated back at Naomi’s side. Ryan had taken his earlier suggestions and now looked
almost presentable, although his choice of clothing still left something to be desired. In a room
filled with clean-cut FBI agents and representatives from the State Department, Kealey was
wearing faded jeans and a threadbare dress shirt — over a T-shirt, untucked — with the first
three buttons undone.
Harper shook his head at the younger man’s pointed efforts to avoid conformity, but knew that
he would let it slide. As far as results were concerned, the deputy director thought that Ryan was
the most valuable person in the room, and at the moment, results were all that he cared about.
They looked up from the maps they were going over as he approached. “Got a minute?”
Naomi nodded and pulled out a chair. As Harper sat down, they immediately noticed that he
was wearing a slight smile. He placed a pile of bank statements on the table in front of them.
“We finally got something on those Saudi passports the Feds picked up at National Airport.
Theresa Barzan held accounts in three major banks in London, accounts into which several large
deposits were recently made. Want to guess where the money came from?”
“Tehran?” Naomi ventured.
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“Try Sudan. First Central Bank of Khartoum. Clever move on the woman’s part… We have no
diplomatic relations with the Sudanese, so we can’t pressure them to release the depositor’s
name.”
“But we can track the money from London, right?” Ryan asked. He frowned slightly. “It wasn’t
actually the Feds that came up with this, was it?”
“No, it got kicked up to the FATF. The Treasury Department figured that would result in more
British cooperation.”
Ryan nodded in approval. The Financial Action Task Force on money laundering had been set
up in the late-1980s to combat organized crime, but since 9/11 had become increasingly
involved in the process of tracking terrorist funds. Both the U.S. and the U.K. were charter
members. “This is a definite lead, but the problem is time.”
“I agree,” Naomi said. She traced a finger down one of the long columns of numbers. “This is
pretty typical, what she’s done here. It’s called smurfing. By breaking down the funds into tiny
amounts, it usually ends up getting lost in the huge number of transactions that take place each
day. And this is only the beginning. From London, she would have routed the original sum
through at least another dozen banks. Even with the starting point, it’s going to take a while to
trace it to the recipient.”
“All the more reason for us to follow up on Ryan’s idea,” Harper responded. He pushed a
second sheet of paper toward them. It was the letterhead that immediately caught their attention.
“This one is nothing helpful,” Harper said. “So don’t get your hopes up. The French Foreign
Office sent off a rocket to the State Department earlier today with an inquiry as to ‘the current
state of our terrorist threat.’ Basically, they wanted to know if we have things under control, and
they weren’t too delicate about letting us know what they thought of our security measures.”
Naomi looked surprised, and Ryan let out a low whistle. “I’ll bet that didn’t go over too well.”
The deputy director smiled ruefully. “You don’t know the half of it. If Chirac ever gets a look at
the response we sent them, he’ll probably have to break off diplomatic relations on principle
alone. Same thing with the Italians. Nevertheless, they’ve decided to stick to the schedule. I just
thought you should know that they’re on their way. Whether we find him or not, this event is
going to happen.”
Standing before the open doors of the cargo area, Vanderveen stared with satisfaction at the
simple elegance of his creation. It was almost a shame, he thought with a brief smile, that he
would soon have to destroy it.
The Ford E-350 van had been purchased from a retired electrician, and the cluttered cargo area
looked as if it might contain anything other than 3,000 pounds of high explosives. The previous
owner had rigged up handmade wooden shelves that were bolted into the upper portion of the
frame, running from back to front the length of the van. Beneath the shelves on either side were
broad sheets of flat pegboard, from which hung tools of every type imaginable. All of it had
been thrown in for a modest fee by the electrician, who had quickly discovered that retirement
was much more expensive than he had anticipated.
Along with the tools had come four large steel trunks that were 32" x 18" x 14". It had not been
enough, of course; after running some quick calculations, and allowing for space for the conduit
on top, Will had purchased one additional trunk through a wholesale warehouse in Richmond.
Then he had bolted the five steel boxes to the floor of the van. Even with the additional trunk,
he still had nearly 25 pounds of the grayish-white material that would not fit in the
compartments. He wasn’t bothered by this development, though, as he was sure that the excess
could be put to some good use.
His decision to use the trunks had necessitated a slight change in the circuit he had devised, but
he still had plenty of number 6 caps at his disposal. At one cap per trunk, there was a little over
37 amperes running through the circuit, but the current moving over each detonator was the
same as he had previously calculated: at just over 6.31 amps, it was enough to ensure the
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destruction of each cap, but not so much as to run the risk of an electrical arc, which would
almost certainly result in a misfire.
He recognized that the use of the trunks was, at best, a weak effort at shielding the van’s true
cargo from prying eyes. At the same time, he didn’t want to have to hang curtains in the rear
windows if it could be avoided. Doing so would almost certainly arouse the suspicion of the
police officers checking vehicles in the vicinity of the motorcade’s route. The drive into the city,
when detection was most likely, would be the most dangerous part of the operation. Once the
van was parked, he would be able to detonate the bomb from the safety of his overwatch
position if it appeared that the device was about to be discovered.
Even if the president managed to escape unscathed, a possibility that Will found highly unlikely,
he knew with complete certainty that nothing would stop his creation from realizing its full
potential.
Vanderveen turned away from the open rear doors of the van and sat back down at his
worktable, gingerly stretching his hands out across the smooth wooden surface. His fingers were
sore from the strain of packing the SEMTEX H into the steel compartments, but he ignored the
pain and opened Shakib’s document to page 117. As he scanned the compact lines of text and
accompanying diagrams, Will thought that whoever had laid out the security plans for this event
had made some serious errors in judgment, errors he was more than happy to take advantage of.
He settled back in his chair and took a long sip of coffee, enjoying the gentle draft of cool air
that found its way through the ancient crevices of the timber walls. There were things still to be
done, but he had time.
He had all the time in the world.
CHAPTER 30
TYSON’S CORNER ? HANOVER COUNTY
Looking up from the exhaustive piles of paperwork covering his temporary desk, Kealey gazed
over the limited space of the CT watch center. It was packed wall-to-wall by more than 80
people who, if being judged only by their frantic gesticulations and elevated voices, might have
been traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange following a merger between
Microsoft and IBM.
He wanted to smile at the mental image that arrived with that thought, but was too tired and
worried to see any humor in the comparison. They had been going nonstop for three days
straight, but their efforts had yielded almost nothing in the way of new information. Seeking to
narrow the search parameters even further, Ryan had argued that they should cut out
Washington, D.C., itself, on the basis that it was too confined an area for Vanderveen to safely
complete his preparations. Emily Susskind, the deputy director of the FBI, had shot down the
idea without a moment’s hesitation.
Naomi had had a little more luck when she suggested that a general description of William
Vanderveen should be released to the state police in Virginia and Maryland. The idea had been
waved away at first: Director Landrieu argued that disclosure of another terrorist threat without
definitive proof would only incite more panic, something that the president desperately wanted
to avoid. Susskind had agreed with him, but Joshua McCabe had sided with Harper in support
of the idea. Since the National Special Security Event designation gave the Secret Service overall
control for the upcoming event, the decision was made to release the description, along with a
carefully worded request for assistance in which the word terrorist did not appear once.
Nevertheless, the telephones and fax machines in the watch center had been going nonstop ever
since, leads pouring in from the Area 17 office in Augusta, Division Four Headquarters in
Wytheville, and the Maryland Barracks in Forestville, College Park, Easton, and Rockville. The
tension in the overcrowded room increased in accordance with the workload, and as Kharmai
watched yet another stack of paperwork gather in the receiving tray, she began to seriously
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question her own decision to involve the state troopers.
She felt a presence at her shoulder and looked up to see that Ryan was standing next to her.
“Anything worth looking at?”
She shook her head and showed him the crumpled sheets of fax paper in her hands. “This stuff is
worthless. If a Caucasian male between the ages of twenty and forty-five did anything to attract
police attention on the eastern seaboard in the last three months, I probably have a file on him,”
she said, gesturing at the pile of stacked reports. “You’d think they would know better than to
waste our time with this kind of garbage.”
Kealey shrugged and said, “It’s not every day that the state police gets a request for assistance
from the TTIC. We were careful with the wording in the description we sent out, but they know
where it’s coming from. They’re going to assume there’s a terrorist threat, which makes their
assistance valuable when the time comes to submit their budgets for the following year. They’re
looking to help themselves first, Naomi.”
“Yeah, well, it would be nice if they could help us out a little bit in the process,” she mumbled.
Ryan grinned and rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. “Come on, I’ll help you look at it. If this
stuff is as useless as you say it is, we’ll be done by twelve, and I’ll treat you to lunch. Sound
good?”
A smile brightened her face for the first time that day. “It’s a deal.”
“What is this shit?”
Sergeant Richard Pittman looked up from the newest stack of paperwork on his desk and
surveyed the room. “Where the hell did this come from? Jimmy?”
“Hell no, Sarge. That came straight from the lieutenant.”
“Yeah, straight to your desk,” Pittman grumbled. “Come on, man. Are you sure some of this
isn’t yours?”
The other officer shook his head and grinned as he lumbered toward the open door. “I don’t see
why you’re complaining anyway, Pitts. We got a two-hour briefing this afternoon that you get to
miss out on. Everyone else is already over there. Whoever dropped that shit on your desk
probably did you a favor.”
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Pittman mumbled. He was the only person left in the room, which he was
grateful for, as it gave him the opportunity to issue a long string of profanities as he picked up
the heavy stack of files and dumped them next to the fax machine. After eight years with the
Virginia State Police, Rick Pittman had thought, on more than one occasion, that he was finally
past these kinds of monotonous chores.
He flipped through the separate sheets of paper and saw that they all seemed to be going to the
same place. I guess that’s something, he thought. There must be seventy-five different reports
here. At least I won’t have to enter a different phone number for each one.
Pittman punched in the number listed at the top of the first page and began feeding the sheets of
paper into the fax machine. Forty-five minutes and two cups of coffee later, he pushed through a
Missing Person Report for NCIC Record Entry.
The report had been filed by Jack Milbery, whose wife, in roughly fifteen minutes, would have
been missing for exactly three days.
As the fax machine whirred on the receiving end in Tyson’s Corner, Will Vanderveen turned the
Honda down his narrow driveway off Chamberlayne Road, leaving a spray of gravel in his wake.
The day had been spent in Richmond, where he had picked up a few last-minute things. Small,
inexpensive items, but items that were absolutely critical to his success. He had made the exact
same purchases nearly three weeks earlier, but had exhausted his supply on two other occasions.
He had watched his speedometer carefully on the short trip south and back, but his brief sojourn
into the city had passed without incident, and now most of the danger was behind him. When the
time came for him to leave the farm again, regardless of what happened from that point
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forward, he would not be returning.
He parked the motorcycle behind the barn. There were several upturned flowerpots next to the
exterior wall. Vanderveen lifted the third from the left, revealing a bulky object concealed in a
carefully folded dish towel. After he collected the HK .40 caliber USP Compact, he took his
time clearing the barn and the house before carrying his purchases up to the kitchen. He had
learned from the unfortunate incident with the realtor. He would not be so careless again.
In the harsh light of the only bathroom, he propped his last remaining passport up against the
cracked tile and stared deep into the face of Claude Bidault, and then up to his own reflection in
the mirror.
His face, without cosmetic aids, was surprisingly youthful despite the fact that he was closing in
