Blood Covenent, page 34
Harper nodded slowly. “Oh, yes.” He moved his mouse pointer to Netscape’s Instant Messenger and clicked up the initial menu. On his buddy list there was one entry called HARLEQUIN, and the icon next to the entry indicated his prey was online. The hunter licked his lips. He could almost taste the essence of the chase. He resisted the urge to click the link. “Patience,” he whispered.
* * * *
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Rehazi reread the entry. His hand froze above the mouse scratch pad. Someone was tracking him, and instinctively he flinched. He tapped the mouse pad and the email reopened:
Hello Dirtbag:
You’ve been very clever with your little band of terrorists. The lads in Trump Tower and Yankee Stadium, and the children you forced me to kill in New York. Let me introduce myself. I am your worst nightmare. I am your personal hunter, and there is no place you can run that I won’t come. You see, there are no civil liberties restraining my actions. I’ve been issued a license to kill. I am your executioner.
Ever wonder about what happened in Connecticut? Do you have any idea why the bomb went off and killed some people, but it never made it to Boston? Oh yes, I know it was headed for Boston, and I know the other one was sent to Washington. No? It’s a mystery isn’t it?
Did you know the weapon was built in a place called Arzamas-16? Its designer called it SAMSON. Arzamas-16 was one of those closed cities Stalin built at the end of World War II. It vanished from the maps for fifty years. Guess what, Dirtbag. I’m going to make you disappear too.
Just remember, I’m tracking you. Every time you make a decision, you narrow your options. Every time you move, you leave a trail, and if I can track you down through cyberspace, I can track you anywhere. Someday soon, we’ll meet. Your days are dribbling away like little grains of sand. Get ready to meet your maker.
Rehazi’s hand shook violently. His heart thundered in his chest, and for a moment, he wondered if he were having a heart attack. He closed the email window hoping it would disappear. Perhaps this was a bad dream.
The Instant Messenger window launched itself. Rehazi cocked his head, and realized the email must have been a signal. His nemesis was now online with him. Rehazi stared at the window. He reached along the side of the laptop and killed the connection. The machine powered down and he slammed the lid shut. Rehazi recognized the tactic, but did not appreciate being at the sharp end of the stick.
He stared at the silent television set and realized nothing had happened to the Supreme Court or the Library of Congress or the Capitol Dome. They were all still glittering with their alabaster smoothness. He stood wiping his palms down the sides of his trousers and marched across the room. He grabbed his overnight bag, the Arby’s sandwich, and the laptop. It was time to leave.
* * * *
Pentagon
“He’s in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” reported Scotty.
Harper thanked him and hung up. He clicked up a map on the computer and said quietly, “You’re going to start running.” He picked up a phone and made a call to Louis Edwards. Harper already knew instinctively whereHarlequin was running to—Chicago. When he finished talking to Louis, Harper made a second call to Jonas. This time his instructions were not speculative or intuitive.
Jonas and Darby had discovered where the anonymous remailer site redirectedHarlequin’s email. It was sent to an ISP server known as Fireball. Fireball is a unique site since it serves the Islamic Republic of Iran and provides a breakwater between the dominant US Internet providers and its thirteenth century—albeit a computerized thirteenth century—society. He realized that in the short term he neededHarlequin alive long enough to identify his masters and learn the location of the remaining bombs. Beyond that, he was nothing more than a sick animal to be put down.
Interestingly, they had discovered a second remailer account directed to the same email address at Fireball. Harper considered the problem and realized he would have a backup plan for emergencies.Harlequin would run to his bolthole. He would have a mechanism for escaping the country and reduce his chances of detection. It would avoid the obvious airports, rail stations, and bus terminals. It might be as simple as driving across the border, but Harper suspected that there was a little more imagination involved.
FlushingHarlequin was only one side of the problem. The other to side involved finding his masters. Harper studied the twoHarlequin emails. He savored the terse style and looked for a hidden pattern in the words. He concluded they were simply words, so Harper wrote a third email. He sent it to Darby and Jonas. It was repackaged and sent to the same email address.
The National Security Agency spread its tentacles around Fireball.com. Every email sent was intercepted, examined, and sent on to its destination. This time no one would be taking the weekend off.
* * * *
Menorca, Spain
The two Kamov KA-29 helicopters darted over the dark sea. They carried the NATO designationHelix-B . They were transport helicopters, each outfitted with a 7.62mm machine gun fixed in the rectangular nose, and each carrying an eight-manspetsnaz rifle squad. The running lights were turned off and the two crewmen wore bulky Soviet-manufactured night vision goggles strapped over their ears. They extended like grotesque telescopes, providing a sixty-four hued green-shaded view of the world without any peripheral vision.
The navigation system displayed, with dimmed hues of green and red, Menorca’s northern coast. A transponder beacon identified the Russian Federation freighter they launched several minutes ago. The freighter continued to sail the western Mediterranean under the night sky. It chugged along at ten knots and was an easy catch for the fasterHelix-B’s .
Each member of the rifle squads had been shown the service photograph of Major Yevgeny Yarovitsin. It was their job to ensure Major Yarovitsin survived the evening and returned to Moscow as soon as possible. Everyone else was a target.
The pilots had no trouble in recognizing the brightly lit villa on the northern shore. The rocky cliffs and jagged shoreline provided no barrier for the airborne attack, and the carefully constructed gates, guard dogs, and monitoring systems were never designed to ward off a determined assault originating from Yevgeny’s previous masters.
TheHelix-Bs bounded upward to avoid the rocky cliff face and spoofed the marginally effective radar system designed to warn the villa of a sea-borne attack. Like a pair of angry dragonflies, they positioned themselves in overlapping sixty-degree arcs forming a lethal kill zone. TheHelix-Bs raked the compound with a deadly crossfire. The nose-mounted 7.62 machine guns sprayed hot brass into the air, and the two helicopters swung in the sky, ensuring they killed everything insight. Nothing was spared as dogs, men, and vehicles burst under the intense attack. Great divots of earth exploded from stray shells. Flowerpots, crockery, and windowpanes shattered as the shells walked across the compound’s open space.
Once the main area in front of the garage was sanitized, the firstHelix-B flared and unloaded its eight-man squad. They split into two four-man fire teams and spread across the bloodied corpses, dispatching anyone still breathing or bleeding too well. They wore no insignia and resembled nothing more than black scorpions as they crab-walked towards the main building. They were dressed completely in black, and instead of bulky night-vision-goggles, they relied on high power halogen lights attached to the under lug of their rifles.
One four-man fire team entered the pool area. They found a pair of bikini-clad women desperately reaching for their towels. The blue tinted light caused the waves to project a web of white and blue lines across the pool. The team opened up for a brief burst. On enemy ground, fire discipline and proper force were the keys to leaving in one piece. The silenced weapons hissed as the gas systems on the rifles absorbed the recoil. Besides the women’s abrupt screams, the only sounds were the rifle bolts sliding to and fro and the gray-green camouflage brass tinkling across the concrete apron. One woman pitched forward into the pool, darkening the water with her purplish blood. The other dropped backwards on a lounge chair. Her features frozen in perfect astonishment.
The other four-man fire team found the Benelli shotgun-toting Basque bodyguards. A twelve gauge shotgun is an awesome and effective close range weapon. The combined firepower from four assault rifles is more than sufficient to handle the scattergun. The firefight was brief, bloody, and for the most part silent. Two shotgun blasts largely devastated a wall and bounced off thespetsnaz troop’s body armor.
The fire teams from the secondHelix-B dropped fragmentation grenades down the steps leading to the subbasement where the monitoring systems and in-house barracks were located. Three concussive shocks later, Yevgeny’s five-man reaction force, still in their stocking feet, died next to their boots. The room that handled all internal and external sensors was a smoking ruin after a fourth incendiary grenade torched the two men on duty and flash-fried the equipment. The squad leader delivered a shot to the back of each man’s head. He paused in the midst of the carnage and changed magazines in his pistol.
TheHelix-Bs hovered above the compound, easily finding the man/dog teams prowling the estate’s perimeter. Short, precise bursts reduced the last of Yevgeny’s home guard to hamburger.
The four fire teams converged on Yevgeny’s study where he had entertained Chaim Wanberg the previous night. He stood with a cognac in his hand. He understood the futility of running from these types of soldiers. Considering the ferocity of the assault and the seeming indifference to life, Yevgeny assumed his former employers had returned to take him home.
The doors barring entrance on two sides of his study exploded inward. The bloody remains of his Basque guards were either trampled underfoot or smeared like strawberry jam across the walls. He resigned himself to what he had always known. The folly started in Andropov’s Kremlin apartments had come to claim him. He tipped his hand to the black-clad soldiers and swallowed his cognac. He surmised it would be some time before he tasted the warm liqueur again.
They left nothing else alive in their wake—they were Russians.
CHAPTER 34
Andrews Air Force Base
Tuesday, July 20, 1999
1:00 A.M. EDT
TheGulfstream IV lifted away from Andrews. Its red and green navigation lights blinked against the night sky and left the softly lit city behind. The diffused lights illuminating the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol Dome were the same as they had been last night. However, the Washington elite of Congressional leaders, administration officials, and law enforcement officials—those senior enough to know what had almost happened—were a shaken group.
Angry phone calls followed by even angrier emails were exchanged in a blizzard of encrypted communications. Fingers were pointing up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, but few seemed willing to examine their own visage in a mirror. The idea of being thankful for someone like Peter Rasmussen hardly skimmed the collective conscience. For seven years, they had bought the lie that government could solve any problem, and suddenly they realized there were no programs designed to thwart a committed bomber.
The demand for a proper briefing descended on the White House with the fury of aTsunami. This time promises did not put off members of the Senate Intelligence Committee or the House Armed Services Committee. It resulted in a select group being ushered quietly from their office building to theVault.Tweedledee andTweedledum were pressed into service. It demanded command performances, not from staff members or experts, but from the Directors of the FBI and CIA. Two men who loathed each other’s presence and vied for a way to make their agency the good guy in an increasingly bad situation. It demanded the presence of the President himself to calm the bloodied waters, and in an era of lies, half-truths and innuendoes, it demanded Washington’s most scarce commodity—honesty.
The four men leaving the squabbling leadership behind were an unlikely group. Louis Edwards commanded the head of the table since he had the dubious job of talking with the Chief of Staff, the National Security Advisor, and any other self-important official who wanted to know something aboutSAMSON. He left General Carnady to witness the fearful elected partake in a bloody feeding frenzy between co-equal branches of government. Blame would be assigned for the twoSAMSON detonations.
Lou Feldman sat opposite Edwards, still stinging from the rebuke the last time he ventured into theVault. Feldman started out as the Assistant Director In Charge of Terrorism, but by the end of this operation, he would look like so much dog meat. He told himself he was the only true professional here. The rest were rabble and renegades. His recent aborted foray into empire building forced him to revert back to the time-honored Bureau methodology of painstakingly examining every piece of evidence. Unfortunately,Harlequin andSAMSON did not fit any of the carefully constructed models, and Feldman was leading the charge into uncharted territory.
Harvey Randall tapped his fingers together. He found himself back inside the chase again. Only he was not quite sure what he had climbed back inside to. The Bureau considered him a pariah, more so for being right about Yankee Stadium and trackingHarlequin to his lair at Trump Tower and Brooklyn. When this was done, his assignment at West Yellowstone would seem like the hub of activity. He was not sure what he would do once they caughtHarlequin , but his time with the Bureau was over. He had one skill—catching bad guys.
Jim Harper was bored. He hated meetings, even in the opulent splendor of fancy executive airplanes. The only redeeming quality was that the plane was taking him home to his girls—Lynn, Catherine, and Grace. He already knewHarlequin’s destination. The fine-tuning would emerge in a matter of hours or days at the most. It profoundly bothered him that he understood his quarry. He considered how he would act without limitations, and the prospect frightened him. Utter ruthlessness beckoned to him this time. The compelling temptation to become what he hunted and to be consumed by the overwhelming evil haunted him every waking moment. The inevitable confrontation withHarlequin gave him pause. He recognized fear and did not like its company.
It turned into a show and tell session as they crossed the Appalachian Mountains. Feldman described the Bureau’s success in identifying the passenger who matchedHarlequin’s description at Reagan National. They had a credit card number and the Bureau’s hackers tracked down credit card purchases made since Friday.
Harper gave greater attention to the description of purchases.
Friday, July 16,United Airlines ticket from Boston to Cleveland.
Friday, July 16,Northwest Airlines ticket from Cleveland to Detroit.
Saturday, July 17,Northwest Airlines ticket from Detroit to Memphis.
Saturday, July 17, $500 cash advance.
Saturday, July 17, Holiday Inn, West Memphis.
Sunday, July 18, $500 cash advance.
Sunday, July 18,TWA ticket from Memphis to St. Louis.
Sunday, July 18, Holiday Inn, Airport.
Monday, July 19, $500 cash advance.
Monday, July 19,TWA ticket from St. Louis to Washington, D.C.
Monday, July 19, Hertz Rental Car, Reagan National Airport.
Monday, July 19, National Car Rental, Reagan National Airport.
Monday, July 19, CompUSA Baltimore, Maryland.
Monday, July 19, Super 8 Motel, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Harper examined the list.Harlequin had already changed identities again. The credit card, driver license and whatever else he used for identification were shredded, burned, or buried somewhere between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh would be a good place to lose the car and melt away to some other mode of transportation. The cash advances made sense as a way of accumulating untraceable money. It meantHarlequin was running towards the other bombs, and where the bombs were, he had resources.
Harvey wrinkled his nose and said, “He sure gets around. Doesn’t his card have a limit?”
Feldman shook his head. “One hundred thousand dollars.”
Harvey gave a low whistle. “I know they hand these things out like candy at a parade, but a hundred grand seems like a lot even for a VISA card.” He leaned forward and said quickly, “So how’d he get it?”
“The bank gave it to him, or at least the person on the card,” replied Feldman as if he were lecturing a green recruit.
“Uh-uh,” disagreed Harvey. He sensed the pattern, but doubted he wanted to bring Harper into another lawyer’s private study. There was a dark side to the man he hesitated to stir. The wolf Edwards had released into the civilian population was hardly tame. Besides, he had Feldman and the entire federal government sitting across from him.
“What you mean ‘uh-uh’?” he asked crossly.
“This guy,Harlequin, hides in layers of legal gobbledygook. There is a law firm that represented the card holder to the bank, and from there you will find an address, and from there we will begin to learn something of how this man operates in Chicago.”
“They teach you that watching buffalo?” chided Feldman. “In case you’ve forgotten, there’s something called the Constitution, and a lawyer isn’t going to turn over a client on our say so.”
“Agreed,” said Harvey. “So why don’t you pick up the phone over there and roust the US Attorney in Chicago and have him get his hundred or so able assistant US Attorneys out of bed and FIND OUT WHO THIS BASTARD IS!”
Feldman looked from Harvey to Edwards, then turned to the communications suite behind him and dialed.
Harper looked across the table to Harvey and asked, “Feel better?”
Harvey split into a big smile and said, “I enjoyed that.”
Feldman turned back to the table. “I hope you’re happy. That was one unhappy lawyer.”
“I’ll have Peter Rasmussen give him a call to explain unhappiness,” muttered Louis.
“Who?” snapped Feldman.
“Peter Rasmussen, the guy who saved Washington today so you could play cop and I could play spy,” explained Louis.
