He headed downstairs to brew himself some coffee, moving slowly in the dark.
26
ETHAN WAS ALREADY SITTING on the bench by the cannon in Fort Marcy Park when Gianna Bertoli and Harlan Banfield arrived just before eight a.m.
As they approached he sat up straighter and looked down at his clothes. They were wrinkled and dirty, he was certain his face was drawn and gaunt, and he could see straight blond hair—hair that he normally kept swept back with molding clay, now hanging in his eyes. He had a black backpack secured on his back, and he wore a Washington Nationals cap on his head and sunglasses he’d bought at a CVS up in Bethesda.
Harlan stepped up to him and shook his hand. “I saw the chalk mark. Damn, son. It looks like you slept here all night.”
He shook his head back and forth slowly.
Bertoli offered him a hug. Ethan stood up and embraced her, his body heavy with exhaustion. “They tried to kill me.”
Bertoli gasped while Banfield made a face of disbelief. “Kill you? What on earth are you talking about?”
“A man in a car. Last night. He shot at me.” Ethan shrugged. Then he added. “He missed. He killed Eve instead.”
Banfield grabbed Ethan by the arms. “Oh my God. How can you be sure? You’re not a doctor.”
“Shot through the fucking heart, Harlan. It doesn’t take a doctor.”
“Who did it?”
Bertoli answered before Ethan. “Mossad. I’d bet my life. You are that important.”
Banfield started pacing back and forth. “ W here is her body?”
“On my living room floor.”
“Christ, son.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? I wasn’t going to bury her in the fucking backyard and I couldn’t call an ambulance.”
“Yes. Of course not,” said Banfield. He looked to Ross like an old man who just realized he was in way over his head.
Ethan shook away from Banfield’s hold. “What do I do now?”
Banfield didn’t answer. He didn’t look like he had a clue. But Gianna emanated an air of calm. She put her hand on his cheek. “You run, Ethan. You run.”
“Run where?”
Bertoli said, “It might surprise you to know it, but the Venezuelans have a very good operation here in Washington. Their embassy has been helpful with our efforts in the past. A few times they were able to provide quick and discreet assistance.”
“Venezuela help American whistleblowers? I never heard about that.”
She gave a half-smile. “I told you they were good. The incidents never came to light.”
“The Feds didn’t find out about them?”
“They discovered the actions and identities of the whistleblowers, yes. But they had their reasons for keeping the incidents quiet. Your case is much the same. If you stay quiet, then they will stay quiet. But the key is getting out of the country as soon as you know they are coming for you. If you are still around they will grab you, and no one will hear from you again.” Ethan looked to Banfield. The older man just nodded gravely. Ethan said, “The guys who went to Venezuela. Are they still there?”
Bertoli said, “Last I heard, one was living in Paris. Nicely, I might add. A prominent journalist. I visited him last fall.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Another went to Buenos Aires. He married a local down there. A third returned to the U.S. She was given immunity from prosecution in exchange for her leaving government service. She’s teaching at a prominent university in South Florida now.” Bertoli smiled. “A good trade, I should think. Miami is beautiful. But more important, in all these cases the government decided to drop the charges because the whistleblowers had taken more data that they never exploited, and they simply returned that data and agreed to leave government service forever in exchange for the government calling off the chase. Everything stayed quiet.”
Ross reacted as if he had been thrown a lifeline. “That’s what I need, Gianna. I don’t want my mother thrown into a big scandal. I don’t want to be chased around by fucking hit men. I just need this bullshit to blow over.”
She said, “Venezuela will help you, I’m sure of it, but they won’t do it for free. If you had something to offer them, I could contact a friend of theirs and make arrangements.”
Ethan smiled for the first time today. “I did it. I have it.”
“The scrape?”
“Yes. One hundred fifty gigs. All categorized and searchable.”
“Oh, Ethan. That is wonderful.”
Ross thought about what gems he could pull from the Intelink-TS scrape that the Venezuelans would find valuable. “I can get the names of all CIA contracted personnel working in their country. Will that buy me a ticket out of town?”
Bertoli smiled. “I feel certain it would.”
“I’ll give them something to let them know I have the goods they want. But the bulk of it will stay on the drive and encrypted until I am out of the U.S.”
“I think that would be agreeable to them.” Gianna thought for a moment. “I’ll need a few hours to set it up. We will hide you out until then.”
“No,” Ethan said quickly. “I have something I need to do first. I’ll meet up with you two later today.”
“You aren’t safe alone.”
“I’ll take my chances. I need about four or five hours.”
Bertoli gave Ethan the phone number to a mobile she’d purchased here in D.C. and had not yet activated, and told him to call her as soon as he was ready.
Ethan put the number in his phone, but he looked at Banfield. “What about you, Harlan?”
Banfield had been silent, but he said, “This is where you and I say good-bye. I am the local director of the ITP, I won’t be handling you when you go abroad.” The heavy balding man looked whiter than usual. He hadn’t recovered since Ethan told him about the assassin, obviously, but he shook Ross’s hand and wished him luck. “Be careful, son,” he said, and Ethan headed back up the trail alone while the other two watched him leave.
DARREN ALBRIGHT SHUFFLED in his seat, annoyed by the delays but energized by the anticipation of action. He checked the time on his mobile phone for the third time in the last ten minutes, and drummed his fingers on the dashboard of the black GMC Yukon while he looked out the window at 1598 34th street, a two-story whitewashed row house.
There had been a virtual cavalcade of suspicious events today, and they all led Albright here to the home of National Security Council assistant deputy director Ethan J. Ross.
It all began when Albright learned Ethan Ross called in sick to work this morning. This in itself wasn’t noteworthy other than the fact he was now a person of interest in a federal Official Secrets Act investigation. Second, the Special Surveillance Group team that had been covertly waiting for him outside his house had reported no activity by ten a.m. If Ross was indeed ill, this meant nothing, but Albright’s suspicions began to grow that he was not even home.
Around eleven, real alarm bel ls began ringing when Albright received word that Ross’s girlfriend, Eve Pang, an IT expert at Booz Allen Hamilton, had not shown up for a meeting she had scheduled with IT personnel at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. She was due in at eight, but since she bounced around to many different remote locations, no one marked her as missing for nearly three hours. Albright himself called her mobile and received no answer, so he sent agents to her place in Bethesda with authorization to force entry if necessary.
The agents kicked in the front door when there was no answer, and inside they found no sign of Ms. Pang, and no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
Immediately upon hearing from his men in Bethesda, Albright dropped all other activity on the case and put the full force of his resources into locating Ethan Ross and Eve Pang. At the same time he applied for an order to make entry on Ross’s home—Ross wasn’t officially missing, so he couldn’t kick his door in without a warrant—but while he waited on the warrant he ordered a BOLO be sent out to local D.C. police on both Ross
and Pang.
Albright and three special agents arrived at Ross’s home at one p.m. A pair of SSG surveillance experts had been under cover as landscapers in the park across the street, and they’d notified Albright that they’d seen no signs anyone was home, but at this point the supervisory special agent decided to just go up to the door and knock.
There was no answer.
He walked around the outside of the building, banged on the basement door and the back door, and then returned to his Yukon to wait for the warrant and to monitor the SSG radio traffic while they looked for their missing persons of interest.
A D.C. METRO POLICE OFFICER ID’d Ross up at three p.m. She noticed a man who looked much like the image on the computer screen in her squad car as he climbed out of a cab on Pennsylvania Avenue. He wore sunglasses and a ball cap and carried a black backpack, to the police officer he looked like a shady character, so she called in the sighting to dispatch. Within five minutes a pair of SSG officers had raced into the area and took up watch on the man. Through the long-range lenses of their cameras they confirmed their target, and they watched as Ross climbed into another taxi.
As the cab rolled down the street, a full sixteen-person SSG follow team converged on it.
Not everyone who works for the FBI, even on operational status, is a special agent. The Special Surveillance Group is an FBI entity charged with investigative support functions for the Bureau, meaning physical surveillance operations. They carry FBI credentials, but they don’t have authority to make arrests and they don’t carry firearms in the field.
The ranks of the SSG are filled with men and woman of all shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds, because a key component of the work is appearing ordinary, not standing out like a Fed, even to a target who knows full well what a Fed looks like. The surveillance specialists who operate in the follow teams are trained in the ability to remain in the shadows while tailing their subjects in vehicles and on foot.
SSG investigative specialists Beale and Nolan were working together this afternoon, tailing their subject’s vehicle as part of the six-vehicle team. The two men were both white males, riding around D.C. in a vehicle together, and this ran the risk of tipping off their target that they were Feds, except for the fact Beale drove a maroon taxi and Nolan was his passenger in the backseat.
Beale was twenty-one years old and had worked for a package-delivery service before landing this job with the FBI. Nolan was forty-six and he’d been a cop in suburb of Des Moines before deciding he wanted to do something more interesting with his time than ticketing speeders and busting teenage drinkers at high school football games, so he answered an online ad for the FBI, and within months found himself tailing foreign spies throughout the streets of D.C., usually on behalf of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
This afternoon’s subject, Ethan J. Ross, was different from their average mark. He was American, a relatively high-ranking employee of the National Security Agency, and, if Beale and Nolan’s brief from Agent In Charge Darren Albright was to be believed, he was a potential insider threat to the U.S. intelligence community.
Both SSG men had backpacks in the cab with them containing various articles of clothing, eyeglasses, hats, and other forms of disguise, but rolling around D.C. in a taxi was a great way to blend in, and they had no plans to ditch their car for a foot follow this afternoon. That said, surveillance was always dictated by the person under surveillance, so Beale and Nolan had to be ready to ad-lib if the situation called for it.
The six-vehicle team had picked Ross up ten minutes earlier from the police tip, and now they stayed in a box pattern in the very familiar streets of the capital as Ross’s cab meandered through traffic. They drove into Georgetown, where Ross was dropped off in front of the Nike store on M Street—fortunately for the SSG team, one of their vehicles had been passing by at the exact moment Ross climbed out because the delivery van that had been serving as the eye lost sight of him on the previous turn.
Beale and Nolan’s vehicle’s movements, like the movements of all the cars, trucks, scooters, and motorcycles on the team, were directed by an operations hub that maintained radio contact with all the officers via ear pieces. Their taxi was several cars out of rotation when Ross left the cab, so they followed orders to move east of the subject’s location and park on Thomas Jefferson Street.
They resumed the eye again a few minutes later as he walked south through Georgetown. They took a few pictures of the man with the Nationals cap and the backpack, but they did it from distance so as not to risk compromise.
“Any guesses as to where he’s going?” Nolan asked as he slid the camera back in his bag.
Beale thought for a moment. “If he’s dirty and working with a foreign intel service, he could be heading to any of a dozen embassies around here.”
Nolan said, “Close up just a little. If it looks like we’re going to lose him, they might authorize an in extremis arrest. If we have to bail out to tackle this guy, I don’t want to get into a foot chase. This prick looks like a runner.”
Beale said, “I’d love it if he was runner. I’ve been involved in a couple of arrests, but I’ve never done a foot chase.”
“Kid, you can be my guest. I chased my share of yahoos when I was a cop in Iowa. I’ll sit here and watch.”
“Man, I don’t believe that. If that dude starts running, you know you’ll start hauling ass after him.”
Nolan smiled. “Yeah. Shit gets in your blood.” He turned serious again. “Still, tighten up. He looks fast.”
Beale chuckled and brought the taxi a little closer and reported his location to the operations hub on the other end of the radio.
27
DARREN ALBRIGHT SAT in his Yukon, staring at Ethan Ross’s house just twenty feet away. The damn warrant was taking forever, but to bide his time he had a walkie-talkie in his hand, and with it he listened in on the SSG tail of one of his two persons of interest.
From Albright’s mental picture of Ross’s movements, it seemed like he was on a dry-cleaning run at the moment, which made him look even more suspicious. One of the agents in the backseat of the Yukon was obviously thinking the same thing, because he mumbled something about maybe moving Ross from person-of-interest status up to suspect status, but before Albright had time to reply, his phone chirped in his pocket. He quickly stowed the walkie-talkie on his hip and answered his phone. “Yeah? Okay. Good.” He pocketed the phone and turned to the men in the SUV with him. “Warrant came through. We’re good to go. Let’s see what’s what in that house.”
He climbed out of the SUV and his three agents followed suit. One went around to the back of 1598 Albright while the two others took the six steps up to the front door.
He banged on the door once, shouted “FBI! Search warrant.” The three men drew their service weapons, .40-caliber SIG Sauer pistols, and Albright himself kicked at door. It had been a long time since he’d had the pleasure of a kinetic entry breach, but he executed it perfectly. The door cracked at the lock and splintered, and it opened fully, setting off a wailing security alarm siren.
Albright ignored the noise and he led the men through the door, his gun high in front of him.
But that single step was all it took for him to register a smell he was trained to recognize, even though he’d never quite gotten used to it. “That’s a cadaver,” he said over the sound of the alarm, and then he moved farther inside so that his men could sweep the area.
He found Eve Pang behind the sofa in the middle of the room. Albright was certain she was dead, but he knelt to check her pulse anyway. As the other two agents slipped quietly into the hallway to begin clearing the rest of the house, Albright pulled his walkie-talkie to his mouth. It was already set on the channel that communicated directly with the head of the SSG team following Ross.
He shouted over the siren. “This is Supervisory Special Agent Albright! I want Ethan Ross picked up right now! Consider him armed and dangerous!”
The terse reply cam
e back instantly: “Understood.”
Albright stood from the body, hooked his walkie-talkie back on his belt, and shook his head in disbelief. “Son of a bitch.”
FOR THE THIRD TIME on this surveillance operation, Nolan and Beale had taken over the eye from one of their colleagues, this time a fifty-year-old woman driving a Vespa. They’d tailed Ross into the promenade of Washington Harbor, a dual-use office building/shopping area with a large public space. Ross was on foot in a pedestrian zone, but they could see him from their vantage point on Thomas Jefferson, so they’d remained in their cab for now. While they parked along the curb, they helped route other cars into the area to control exit points off the promenade, and the operation’s hub rushed officers to the ferryboats that left from the harbor for Potomac cruises just in case the subject tried to board.
Beale had positioned his taxi so that he could pick Ross back up first if he decided to slip around the harbor complex and walk back up north into the heart of Georgetown. The concern remained the man would try to slip into an embassy, and Georgetown was loaded with potential places for a spy to run and hide.
Just as Ross slipped out of sight in the promenade, a call came through both men’s earpieces. “Uniform Victor, this is control. Maintain the eye while we move SWAT to your location. Immediate arrest has been authorized, but we are advised subject is now considered armed and dangerous.”
Beale and Nolan were designated Uniform Victor. Beale responded into his headset, “Roger that. We’ll have him again in twenty seconds.” He glanced at his “passenger” in back. “This clown doesn’t look armed and dangerous.”
Nolan rolled his eyes. “Everybody’s armed and dangerous to SWAT. Otherwise they wouldn’t have shit to do.”
“I hear you.”