First Strike (25 page)

“Who else would it be, old son? Happy birthday, little brother.”

“We’ve had a visitor.”

“And who would that be?”

“A woman. Pretty. Green eyes. Auburn hair. Nice tits. Good legs. Bitch gave me a hard-on. A journalist, or so she says. My guess is Secret Service. Claimed to be a friend of yours.”

“Did she say a name?”

“No way.”

“Leave a message?”

“Just that she’d like to make contact. And for you to stop whatever it is you’re up to. Bold as brass, said Ma and me could be in danger. I told her to fuck off.”

“Liam, do you remember your auntie Maude?”

“Sure I do.”

“Take Ma and leave the house at once. Go and stay with your Auntie Maude in the North. There’s people there who’ll look after you.”

The sound of police sirens grew louder in the background and the line went suddenly dead. Bowman re-played the tape and recognised the green eyed, auburn haired woman. Jesus Christ, Melanie, what the hell are you up to? Don’t make things more difficult than they already are!

Bowman put a copy of the tape in his pocket and turned to Agent Moreno. He was blushing.

“Cal, about last night.”

“Last night didn’t happen.”

She put on a pair of headphones and pretended to ignore him as she fiddled with the controls on one of the consoles.

“Fine. Right. It didn’t happen.”

“Look, Alex, try to understand. I have this unique combination of rare medical conditions. With some people it’s facial tics and twitches. With me it’s words. Tourette’s makes me like to talk dirty. Coprolalia gets me aroused. Once in a while, like last night, something sets me off and things get out of hand. When that happens I can’t control it. Maybe I don’t want to control it. But don’t worry, Alex, I promise it won’t happen again.” She turned to face him. “I apologise, OK? Can you live with that?”

Bowman wondered what would trigger an attack. Could it be the adrenalin rush? The thrill of ensnaring O’Brien, the chase? She had performed magnificently last night, handled things with aplomb. Maybe coming down from such a high had set off a reaction.

As Bowman reached the door Cal said,

“Who is she?”

“Who’s who?”

“The woman on the tape, Alex. Green eyes. Auburn hair. Nice tits. Great legs.” Cal intoned flatly, flipping through the pages of her notepad. “I think that’s an accurate quote.”

Bowman closed the door noiselessly behind him. As he walked down the corridor he heard Cal mutter,

 “Gimme a break, Alex. She could be a lead.”

***

Bowman stepped outside onto Pennsylvania Avenue, walked across to the Mall and placed his regular call to Robert Jennings in the Oval Office, just a few hundred yards away. It was a damp cold morning. The sky was heavy with cloud. He informed the Director of Counter Terrorism of last night’s events and the work he had done in Baltimore.

“Jesus, Alex, I can’t believe you let him get away.”

“Almost had him. We came really close. Another five minutes would have done the trick, but he knows to keep his calls short. But at least we know he’s in Washington. Trouble is, he knows we know. You can hear the sirens on the tape.”

“So what do we do now, Alex?” There was exasperation in his voice.

“We know the nuclear material came in through Locust Point about a year ago. The good news is you have the serial number of the container and an accurate description. Go find it.”

“Every available agent in America is already out there looking.”

“Concentrate on Baltimore. It’s probably still in the docks area there, waiting for O’Brien to supply the detonator, the explosive, and put the package together. But I have a strong hunch the target is here in DC. The bad news is, if they planned that far ahead the stuff is definitely weapons grade. You should have NEST teams crawling all over the city. Every public building. Every national monument. O’Brien intends to make a statement the world will not forget. He’ll choose a specific spot with care, to maximise the symbolism of the event. But it won’t be the White House or the Capitol. Too obvious. Too well protected. He’ll go for something a lot more esoteric. Something personal to him.”

The sun burst through the clouds, silhouetting the great obelisk of the Washington Monument and illuminating the Capitol. “The specific target isn’t important, Alex. He’s going to wipe out an entire city.”

“The specific target is vital to O’Brien. And that’s how we’ll catch him. He has to detonate the bomb at some specific place. But he may still fail to disperse the nuclear material. In that case his place in history depends on destroying some major monument or building with the conventional explosive. He craves that high symbolic value. That’s what drives him. But it has to be personal to him.”

“Jesus, Alex, how do you know all this stuff?”

“I don’t know anything. This is all conjecture. But I’m beginning to get a feel for our man. It’s the actor in him. He wants to see his name in lights.”

***

36

A black Labrador found the bloated body bobbing among the reeds. The police estimated the big man had been in the river for about seventy-two hours. They searched the site for ID but found none, making theft a probable motive. They hauled the rigid swollen corpse out of the water and dumped it unceremoniously in the back of a flatbed. There were bloodstains all over his clothing with an unusual concentration in the chest and crotch areas. When they examined the corpse more closely they noticed the penis was missing, making sex the primary motive. The photos they found in his shirt pocket confirmed it. They let the dogs loose to forage for the missing member but the hounds came up with nothing so they covered the corpse with a tarp and drove back into Rockville for a more detailed examination.

The vehemence of the knife thrusts and the missing penis indicated a frenzied sexual attack but there were no semen traces on his clothing and the victim had not been sodomized. As the pathologist prized open his mouth and made ready to insert a probe, she found an unexpected obstruction. She extracted it with a pair of tongs and held it up to the light.

“There’s your little prick.” She dropped the withered penis into a clear plastic evidence bag and sealed and labelled it. “Oh that’s so cute.”

They photographed the head, face and body with a five million pixel camera that recorded every scratch, pore and crevice, downloaded the images onto a laptop and emailed his mug shot and fingerprints to the Hoover Building. Forensics came up with zilch. Next they took swabs from his mouth for DNA testing and couriered these and his clothing to the FBI lab at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue. The swabs revealed nothing. But the victim’s clothing was impregnated with traces of TNT and Semtex together with an unusually dense concentration of one particular dust particle. It took forensics fifteen minutes to identify the material as high-grade Oriskany sandstone with a silica content in excess of 95%. Four hours later they had traced its origins to Warm Springs Ridge in Morgan County in the northern Appalachians where the glass making industry flourished. The combination of explosives and sandstone particles indicated just one thing. The victim worked in a quarry. They circulated his mug shot and description to local police forces throughout Morgan County West Virginia and by 8 a.m. the next morning they had a confirmed ID.

Agent Moreno had spent that day monitoring the airwaves, scanning FBI and police radio and telephone traffic for the key words Bowman had suggested. She’d added the complete Noraid directory that included every Irish surname you could think of and some additional key words of her own like car-crash, suicide, detonator, blade and an entire lexicon of explosives. Nothing was related specifically to a sex attack but well before the Agents handling the case identified the victim, Echelon’s alarm bells started ringing. Cal called Bowman to bring him up to speed.

“Alex? This is Agent Moreno.”

“Hi, Cal.”

“I don’t think this is necessarily what you’re looking for but I have one dead Irishman. Victim of a sex attack.”

“How’d you know he’s Irish?”

“His name’s Murphy.”

“That’s a clue. Why’d you think it was a sex attack?”

“Somebody severed his penis and stuck it in his mouth.”

“Could be significant. What else?”

“Victim works in a quarry. There’s traces of sandstone and Semtex on his clothing.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Boss Murphy was not included in any Noraid data but other than that he had every characteristic Bowman was looking for as a possible supplier of the explosive and the detonator. He had access and he had the expertise. Bowman’s first thought was to take a trip to Warm Springs Ridge and make his own enquiries, but he decided against it. He would settle for copies of the local police and FBI reports. Later that day he had a description of the stranger who had come across the water. It didn’t sound much like Declan O’Brien, the long dark hair, the full luxuriant beard. But Bowman knew it was he. The blade work gave it away. All this meant nothing to the local Rockville investigators. But it meant everything to Bowman. The explosive and the detonator were now in place. The bomb was primed. The clock was ticking.

Twenty-four hours later, Boss Murphy’s partially burnt out truck was discovered in a deserted parking lot on a derelict industrial estate on the outskirts of DC. Forensics revealed traces of the same dust and explosives particles as were found on Murphy’s clothing. The truck’s interior was smeared with Murphy’s blood and there were clear prints left by his presumed assailant. These were scanned into the FBI computer but revealed nothing. It was a rookie cop in Morgan County who recognised the Irish connection and suggested the prints be wired across to Dublin. The Garda Siochana came up with a match right away. The police in Rockville and Warm Springs Ridge issued statements to the local press, radio and TV stations. The press releases also linked O’Brien to the IRA’s activities in Colombia. Nobody in Rockville took much notice of this, but when O’Brien’s IRA connections were publicized in Warm Springs Ridge its citizens were outraged.

As these developments occurred Agent Moreno kept Bowman updated on an hourly basis. Bowman was impressed with the intelligence she provided but for Cal the whole thing was routine. She thought highly of her own abilities, and with reason. Her grades at the FBI Academy at Quantico and her job performance at the Hoover Building confirmed her outstanding talent. But Cal wasn’t vain enough to think she was unique. Other agencies within the intelligence community employed people just as smart as she was. The techno-spooks at National Security and the CIA, even in Military Intelligence, would have skills as well honed as her own. And equal access to Echelon. What didn’t occur to Cal was that they might have a different agenda. That just one mile away, on the other side of the Potomac, government agents might be seeking O’Brien not to stop him, but to shield him.

***

37

The President of the United States was an early riser. He was at his desk by 7 a.m. each morning. Over coffee he would scan the early editions of the east coast papers; the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald. For international input he would flip through the London Times, the Telegraph and the Echo. On this particular day all the broadsheets had one common theme. The President’s approval rating was in the slide. The after-glow of 9/11 was fading fast as domestic issues and the faltering economy pushed their way to the fore. The dollar was weak. The stock market was in free-fall. Real estate values were plummeting. The price of gold had soared to $489 an ounce. But these were problems the President knew he could not solve. Only the economic cycle could cure them, and that was out of sync with his own election timetable.

At 8 a.m. Bob Jennings was shown in to the Oval Office to make his regular report.

“We’re making good progress Mr President. He’s still right here in DC. Last night the bastard made a big mistake and apparently topped his lover. Now every law enforcement agency in town is out there looking for him. We’ll sure as hell catch him next time he picks up the phone.”

Jennings went on to relate the events of the previous evening till the intercom on the President’s desk interrupted him in mid flow.

“The Secretary of Defence is here to see you, Mr. President.”

“Send him in.” The President turned to Jennings. “Bob, I haven’t had a chance yet to bring you up to speed, but the Secretary of Defence has an interesting take on our problem. Something I haven’t discussed with you before. Stick around. Listen to what Herzfeld has to say. I think you’ll find this very interesting.”

Karl Herzfeld took a seat opposite the President and acknowledged Jennings with a friendly smile. There was something cadaverous about the Secretary of Defence that reminded Jennings of the Skull of Zurbaran.

“Mr Secretary,” The President spoke in formal terms. “I was telling Director Jennings you have a totally different take on our problem. Would you care to explain your thinking to him?”

“With your permission, Mr President, I’d be glad to.” Herzfeld turned his fun-filled eyes on Jennings. “Basically, Bob, the way I see it, we should let it happen. Let this Irish fellow pop his bomb.”

“You can’t be… ” Jennings’ jaw stayed open.

“Oh but I am, Bob. Absolutely serious. Look, the way I see it, the biggest rogue on the planet isn’t Tirofijo and it isn’t even Al Qaeda. It’s their paymaster. Saddam. Now, as you know, the President and I want to fight a war with the sonofabitch. Finish off what Desert Storm began. But, as you also know, we haven’t exactly been overwhelmed by popular support, either here in the States or abroad. Even the Brits are lukewarm. And the fucking French are dead against it.” Herzfeld frowned to show his disappointment. “Now, up to a couple of weeks ago, we thought we had the bastard in a box. We were ready to strike. Cruise missiles were primed and loaded. Special Forces had infiltrated across the border from Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey to positions around Baghdad and Tikrit. Then the little shit out-foxed us. Agreed to let the UN inspectors back in. Now the fucking French are threatening to veto. We’ve had to put our plans on hold.”