on the driver’s body, which tumbled lifelessly out into the road.
Then he was in the car and moving away, not bothering to fully close the door until he had
already upshifted twice. Looking up to the rearview mirror, he saw the glass doors of the
National Place building swing open as a figure emerged at a dead sprint.
Kealey burst out onto F Street in time to see the red Camry pulling away in a squeal of tires. He
had the Glock up in a heartbeat, banging away two shots at the retreating vehicle, going for the
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tires but catching the bumper instead.
Then it howled around the corner onto 14th, disappearing from view. Kealey swore under his
breath, saw the body on the street and moved to pull someone out of their vehicle. Seconds
later, a pair of black Suburbans with light racks flashing on top came flying up behind him on
13th Street, slamming forward to a halt at the intersection. Then there were men streaming out
of the vehicles with their MP5s locked onto his head, screaming, “FBI! Drop the gun! Drop the
gun right now!”
Kealey turned and shouted back, for what seemed like the tenth time in as many minutes, “I’m a
Federal officer! Susskind knows me, for Christ’s sake! The guy you’re looking for just turned
that corner—” He almost pointed before he realized he still had the gun in his hand. “In a red
Camry. I got the plate—”
“Put the gun on the ground! Do it!”
The people approaching him didn’t look all that accommodating. He had his left hand on the
door handle of a silver Mercedes, the middle-aged woman behind the wheel staring up at him in
fear and shock. Ryan took his hand away and lifted his arms at the elbows, the grip of the gun
pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Swearing again, he set the weapon
on the pavement and stepped back as the agents swarmed in around him.
It was over, and Vanderveen was gone.
CHAPTER 35
LANGLEY ? CAPE ELIZABETH
The debriefing was held at Langley more than eight hours later, with very few people in
attendance. The director’s office was spacious enough to accommodate the small crowd, which
included Naomi Kharmai, who had been flown back from Ashland courtesy of the Virginia
State Police, Jonathan Harper, DCI Andrews, and Ryan Kealey.
It had been relatively easy for Harper to get Kealey out of FBI custody. Susskind spoke to the
D.C. field office’s HRT commander just minutes after the second shooting on F Street, and
orders had been relayed from there to the team that was holding him. The handcuffs came off
almost immediately, and his Beretta was retrieved from Howson’s body and returned to him.
The agents that he rode with expressed regret at the incident, but only reluctantly; the muted
apologies he received were next to inaudible. The Suburban in which Kealey was seated
departed immediately for Tyson’s Corner, but most of the agents remained behind to secure the
scene and wait for reinforcements.
He couldn’t really blame them for arresting him. He had been out on the street in civilian clothes
with a gun and no identification, standing less than 5 feet from a man with a gunshot wound to
the head. In retrospect, Ryan realized that being confronted by the highly trained HRT
operators was a lot better than most of the alternatives. At least they hadn’t shot him out of
panic.
When he arrived at the TTIC less than twenty minutes after leaving the scene, the helicopter
blades were already turning. Despite angry protests from Director Landrieu and Joshua
McCabe, Harper had arranged for transport for Ryan and himself so they could be immediately
flown back to Langley. Unfortunately, that was where the rapid movement ended. They had
been forced to wait for hours, as the DCI had been caught up in a lengthy inquisition by a shaken
President Brenneman at the White House. Now, seated in the director’s capacious office, the
events of the morning seemed like nothing more than a horrible dream.
It wasn’t a dream, though, and Ryan had proven it by recounting his story to Director Andrews
no less than three times, all the way from the time he received Harper’s telephone call up until
his detainment by the FBI. Kharmai had also been asked to thoroughly describe the events that
had transpired in Hanover County. The two junior officers did most of the talking, but they got
some of the answers they were looking for as well.
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Naomi was seated next to Ryan, while the two senior officials sat in comfortable armchairs on
the other side of a low coffee table. She had enjoyed a long hot shower in the women’s locker
room upon returning to Langley, and someone had been dispatched to her house to pick up
some clothes. Her unknown benefactor had chosen well. As a result, she looked a thousand
times better than she had that morning, and was anxious to learn more about the disastrous raid
in Virginia.
Harper was the one to explain it to her. “The Bureau’s Explosives Unit concentrated their
efforts on the basement. They found damage consistent with a gas-leak explosion, but leaks
almost always originate from the output valve, which is located on the ground floor. So they
think that Vanderveen disconnected the fittings to the stove, drilled a hole into the tile and
rigged up a hose leading down to the basement. Then he used duct tape to seal off the hole and
all the air vents leading out, so that the gas was just trapped down there.”
Harper took a sip of coffee and continued: “They found other evidence that corroborates that
account as well. There were pieces of a gasoline can — one of the old-fashioned metal ones —
jammed into the walls, and what appeared to be two contact plates and traces of SEMTEX H.
He didn’t have time for anything fancy, so he simply taped a block of explosives to a gasoline
can, then wired up a battery to an electric cap. The device was set to go off when the buffer was
removed from between the steel plates.”
Ryan was shaking his head. “What about the bomb in the van?”
“That one was a little more complicated, though not overly so,” Harper said. “They only got
around to moving it a few hours ago; there were some concerns about booby traps, especially
after what happened in Hanover. The ATF guys that are taking it apart all say the same thing:
simple, but efficient. He wired up a cell phone to the SEMTEX H, which was concealed in five
steel trunks. By the way, you would have been screwed if you’d gone in through the back, Ryan.
He had antihandling devices on the phone and two of the trunks.”
“But not the switch.”
“Not the switch,” Harper agreed. “He didn’t want to risk a premature explosion, so a wrong
number to the phone wouldn’t have made a difference as long as there was no power going from
the battery to the circuit. You said you heard the phone ring?”
“Yeah, it rang about two seconds after I flipped it.”
“That was Vanderveen trying to set it off. Those few seconds made all the difference, Ryan.”
Ryan felt a little bit sick over how close he had come to being wiped out, along with about eight
city blocks. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “all I did was flip a switch.”
Harper was nodding slowly. “He needed to be able to activate it quickly, but he couldn’t exactly
get in the cargo area and start rooting around in the middle of a busy city street. It was the best
way for him to do it, and if it wasn’t for you showing up when you did, it would have worked.”
Ryan fell silent. He didn’t want to think about what had almost happened. There would be
plenty of time for that later, but Naomi didn’t notice his hesitation, and she wasn’t finished:
“What kind of damage are we talking about?”
The deputy director cleared his throat. “Well, there’s no definitive answer. I talked to Bateman
— that’s the guy heading up the ATF task force, by the way — and he gave me some round
numbers. We would have been looking at serious damage to every building in a four-block
radius, plus some varying damage out to twelve blocks from ground zero. That would have
included Freedom Plaza and Pershing Park. Estimates, and there is some dispute on this, are
between 400 and 500 dead, plus anywhere up to 2,000 injured. The time of day was factored in
to that as well; if it had been a few hours earlier, for example, the casualties would have been
much lower.”
Ryan looked at his hands.
Director Andrews turned to stare out the window, ashen-faced. “My God.”
“What about the angle?” Ryan asked. “He was going after the motorcade, right?”
Harper nodded and said, “That’s right. There’s even more dispute over that question. He was
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definitely going after the motorcade, but it’s not clear if he would have been successful. Bateman
thinks it would have worked, but the Bureau’s people are saying otherwise.”
The DCI broke in and added, “He stacked the odds in his favor by placing concrete blocks
against the partition. That close to the actual device, it would have pushed most of the force of
the blast directly out into 13th Street. I think he came closer than anyone wants to admit.”
Kharmai and Kealey fell silent at the candor of the remark, but Director Andrews was only
getting started. He turned back from the window to appraise them carefully. “Needless to say,
there’s going to be some serious fallout in the next few weeks. The first choice, of course, would
have been to keep the whole thing quiet. After Senator Levy’s assassination and the
Kennedy-Warren, the last thing we need are reports of a 3,000-pound bomb nearly taking out
the president’s motorcade. If it had just been the evacuation on the waterfront, we could have
explained it away. A few heads would have rolled, but we might have swept it under the mat.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. Vanderveen killed two people in his escape, including a
Metro police officer. Both of them died in crowded areas, so there’s no way we can play it
down. This is going to be headline news for the foreseeable future, so the president’s advisors, in
all their wisdom, are trying to spin it into a positive thing, a major success for U.S. law
enforcement. No one wants to call it what it really was.”
“A near disaster,” Ryan said.
Andrews nodded in agreement. “Exactly. But it’s out of our hands now, so if they want to play
politics, we have no choice but to play along. Anyway, the president is looking to publicly slap
some backs. That means you two. Especially you, Ryan.”
Kealey’s response was immediate and heartfelt. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” He
saw the DCI’s reaction, checked himself, then said, “Excuse me, sir. I just don’t want to have
anything to do with it. Besides, we’ve never operated that way, and the president knows it. I
don’t want my face on television, and I don’t want to give any interviews. I just want to know
what we’re doing to catch the bastard.”
Harper looked up and sighed heavily. “He didn’t get far in the Camry. It was found in an
underground parking garage in Anacostia, and in the trunk, the body of a twenty-nine-year-old
secretary.” Ryan swore and looked away, thinking about how close he had come to stopping
Vanderveen. “He chose carefully; there were no cameras in the garage, no way to immediately
determine what kind of car he switched to. The woman was missing her purse, so it took a while
to track her down. They started with the neighboring buildings… When they found her
employer, they got her name and a vehicle registration from the DMV. Then, of course, they
found out that her car was missing. So there’s a nationwide APB out on her Camaro, but no one
is especially hopeful. Just taking the woman’s ID gave Vanderveen a two-hour jump on
Susskind’s people.” The deputy director paused to take a sip of coffee. Studying Harper’s weary
expression, Ryan thought that the man looked exhausted, then realized that he probably didn’t
look much different himself.
Harper was still talking. “Since this is all going public anyway, the president has given us free rein
to track Vanderveen down. His name is already on the list of Most Wanted Terrorists, and we’ve
gotten his face to passport control at every major airport in Western Europe, as well as Africa
and Australia. He inadvertently helped us out with that… The picture on the Nichols’s driver’s
license is probably less than two years old, which makes it much more recent than the army shots
we were working with before. We’ve sent those updates to Interpol as well.”
“Vanderveen’s been tied to Iran and Al-Qaeda,” Ryan reminded them. “He has access to
money, so he’s not exactly obliged to fly commercially. They might have arranged for a charter
months ago, probably to some dinky little airfield out in the middle of nowhere.”
“You think he’s gone, Kealey?” asked the DCI.
“It would make sense, sir. If he stays here, he’s opening himself up to the biggest manhunt in the
history of U.S. law enforcement. Besides, you know as well as I do that if he gets to Iran, we’re
pretty much screwed. We have no assets there to speak of, unless something’s changed in the last
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twelve months.”
Harper sighed heavily. “Nothing’s changed.” He thought about it, then said, “He failed, though.
If he’s on his way back to Tehran, he probably won’t be getting a very warm reception.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ryan said. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
The meeting adjourned five minutes later. Kealey and Harper walked side by side down the hall,
neither finding much to say, each lost in his own private thoughts.
Harper, just to break the silence, said, “You’ll be getting a medal, you know. Naomi, too.
Probably something pretty.”
Ryan shrugged halfheartedly but didn’t smile. “I don’t really care about that.” He glanced over
at the other man quickly. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s just that I really don’t care.
Besides, it’s not like I can show it to anyone anyway.”
Harper laughed a little at the way he had phrased it as they approached the elevators. “Not this
time, Ryan. This is one of our few public accomplishments, our day in the sun. Might as well
enjoy it while it lasts.”
Kealey didn’t respond right away, once again lost in his own little world. Finally, he said, “You
can mail it to me, John. I’m going home. Tonight.”
Harper found himself nodding in agreement. “Landrieu won’t be happy,” he observed. “He’s
already pissed that you came here instead of getting debriefed back at Tyson’s Corner.”
“Fuck him,” Ryan said. “Fuck him. He fought you on that ID thing, and I really needed it. I was
