Guardians of the Secret
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All rights Reserved
21.
Hilliard was at home when he got the call. He asked to be notified if there was any change in status. The agent calling was irritated, he considered it a nuisance. Hilliard knew exactly how he felt. He even remembered how he swore when he was an agent that he would never be a meddling, politically motivated, out of touch bureaucrat.
Bad news. Their on site contact was late reporting. Then came reassurance. "It's not of immediate concern, he'll find his spot. It's a lot of hours until tomorrow midnight. We've got them bracketed, those trucks aren't going anywhere without an escort. Not to mention what we already have waiting for them at the UN. At this point I wouldn't have even called except you asked."
Hilliard knew the word prick would have finished off the sentence nicely. He got off the phone. He knew these things happen routinely, but why wait to worry when you can torture yourself now. He took a pill and began to live with the worst.
* * *
Everett and his team drove up into the hills of Eastern West Virginia where he knew the FBI would have difficulty following too closely. The FBI had heard from Earl that Everett planned to make a stop there, so they weren't surprised. It made it easier to maintain a moving perimeter surrounding Everett's convoy.
Everett had the vans parked at a remote property, and when it got dark they buried them. The FBI's perimeter was on all the roads. One by one Everett's team sneaked through the woods in between them.
* * *
It was seven thirty when Michael and Tess reached the municipal airport in Pennsylvania. They were meeting Hilliard at eleven in Washington and didn't have a lot of time. Michael hurriedly checked the Runway Cafe, pilots and planes.
While the look of the place hadn't changed much, there were all new names and faces. He didn't find anything, but given the rush and the fact that he didn't want to risk too much exposure, it wasn't surprising. Michael and Tess started back toward Washington.
"Still think they're going to use this place?" Tess asked.
"Definitely."
"You must have seen something you're not telling me."
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"A very pregnant nothing."
"A pregnant nothing? I like that. No wonder your friends at the DEA called you Young Ahab. You don't even need a white whale, an invisible one will do."
"Nobody even heard of Everett. You can take that two ways. I take it to mean he's allowed this field to lie fallow long enough. I'm sure they're coming through here."
"I'll go with your instincts. We'll camp out here tomorrow night. If you can convince Hilliard, we'll have company. Or we'll do it alone."
* * *
The FBI got a tip about three vans on the other side of the Shenandoahs near Harrisonburg and highway 81. They couldn't verify it. They got nervous, especially after they found a dirt access road through the woods past where their perimeter was. There was no sign of vans or anybody on the property. They checked all the roads, nothing.
Hilliard was passed the word that they were gone. No trucks, no team. No contact whatsoever. On site could still suddenly appear, the vans still could be sighted, things still could go as planned in New York. But it wasn't in Hilliard's nature to count on any of that.
The news gave his upcoming meeting with Michael a definite upgrade. Whatever Michael had went from an added piece of information to something possibly vital. How to handle it? Leave it to the chance of a one on one with someone as volatile as Michael? He could be a hero if it worked, but if he screwed up it better be by the book. He had to be careful.
* * *
Michael had known the park in Washington in better days. The few left overs from the families, teenagers, lovers, dog walkers and Frisbee throwers seemed totally out of place in the same tract of land occupied by the homeless, drunks and drug dealers. They were all isolated or in small tightly clustered groups separated by lots of space. This urban universe was not expanding, but its inhabitants were still drifting further and further apart.
"Great meeting place," Tess said sarcastically as she and Michael drove around the park.
"It's changed. But I didn't choose it for the atmosphere. It's relatively empty."
"So are a lot of places at this hour."
"I once chased a dealer in this park, and he had a neat way of losing me. If we need to get lost tonight, we'll do what he did."
First setting up their escape route, Michael and Tess parked the car and sat on a bench overlooking the dimly lit park and waited for Hilliard.
* * *
In Alexandria three green vans drove out of a warehouse and headed for downtown Washington. One was loaded with an M2 machine gun and another with plastic explosive, fuel oil and dynamite.
* * *
Michael and Tess watched the park empty except for those that got high in it or called it home. Tess checked her watch. It was eleven thirty.
"He's always late," Michael explained.
"You know, one way of not being late is not showing up."
Ten minutes later Michael spotted a car slowly driving along the edge of the park.
"That's him."
Hilliard got out and started toward them, carrying a file folder. Michael managed a smile as Hilliard waved the folder. Michael's smile vanished. Two unmarked cars pulled to a stop near Hilliard's. Hilliard turned.
"They're not with me!"
"Fuck you."
Michael motioned to Tess.
"Get the car."
Tess disappeared into the trees behind them. Michael drew his gun. Hilliard was flabbergasted.
"You crazy motherfucker."
"A little louder so they can pick it up on your wire."
Hilliard shook his head in disbelief.
"I don't have to take this shit."
Hilliard tossed the file folder to the ground.
"Now you've got what you wanted. What have you got for me?"
Michael started toward the file, but suddenly froze. Two park regulars were ambling in his direction. Hilliard reached into his coat. Michael fired over Hilliard's shoulder sending him to the ground. Michael dashed through the trees behind him.
Tess was parked in an alleyway with the engine running. Michael jumped a nearby fence, got in the car and Tess sped off. Michael was hyperventilating with rage.
"He owed you one and he set you up?"
Michael ran it over in his head.
"Yeah."
"You say that like you're not sure. You're sure, right."
Michael didn't say anything.
The two fell silent as they slowly drove on aimlessly through the streets of Washington. They reached a major interchange. Highway signs pointed in all directions.
"Which way?" Tess asked. "We've got time before tomorrow night."
As they worked on an answer, a drunk driver behind them began honking his horn. Michael waved for him to go around them. They were the only two cars in sight. The driver kept honking. Irritated, Michael motioned to him again. "All the room in creation and he has to sit behind us."
Michael and Tess began to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Lost in the sound of their laughter and the honking was a muffled high pitched noise. They ignored it along with the honking. It got louder. Michael and Tess finally noticed.
"What the hell?" Michael questioned and in the same moment realized the answer. He jumped in the backseat and grabbed a duffel bag. He madly rifled through it and pulled out the wafer sized receiver, which was beeping away.
"Everett's here."
"Where's here?"
"A few miles away. They could be parked in a warehouse for the night, they could be doing sixty heading away from us. Let's close on them before they get out of range. Tess sped across two lanes of highway going south. Michael superimposed a five mile circle on a mental map of Washington. If the vans were on the periphery of it? They would need some luck.
Three miles away a green van drove along the Arlington Bridge. It was heading straight for the Lincoln Memorial. Twenty seconds later a second van arrived at the Jefferson Memorial. It circled around the Memorial and stopped. The side door slid open revealing an M2 machine gun inside. The image in the crosshairs was crystal clear. The White House lay in a direct line of fire.
Tess zigzagged at high speed through Washington, trying to orient her turns to the ups and downs of the receiver's beeping. They would seem to gain on them, only to lose direction on one of the traffic circles. Michael monitored the signal as it was getting louder.
"The way we're closing, they're at least not doing sixty. They're on surface streets."
A minute later he knew they were heading downtown. There were bridges and freeway entrances offering numerous avenues of escape. The only hope was catching up to them before they sped off on one.
At ten minutes past twelve there were just a handful of visitors at the Vietnam Memorial. To the usual quiet sacramental atmosphere was added the enveloping silence of cold night. Visitors, some with candles, including a family with a teenage son, solitary onlookers, and four Vietnam vets, dressed in fatigues, were paying homage.
The teenager looked away. What he happened to see didn't fit any reasonable mental picture of reality, and his mind tried to contradict his senses. This wasn't happening. A blinking of his eyes would surely eradicate this aberration. It didn't. A van was driving up the lower steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The teenager was drawn to this rupture of the normal order as if he were acting in a dream. He started sprinting toward the Memorial. The Vets took notice.
The van reached the top of the steps. It drove between the pillars and pulled to a stop.
With the receiver going crazy, Michael and Tess finally caught the right direction off of first Dupont and then Washington circle and were racing down 23rd street.
"Slow down they could be turning off for the bridges," Michael cautioned.
Tess eased off the accelerator.
"Which way?"
"I'm trying to make sure. If we miss the turn now, they're gone."
Tess approached the intersection of 23rd and Constitution.
"I don't think they turned."
Michael listened carefully for a change in the beep. He caught sight of the Lincoln Memorial. He saw it first as part of a locus of streets, directions the van might be moving. His personal memories added themselves to that impression, and finally the Memorial as a locus of the nation's passions and the militia's. He looked down at the car clock. It was a quarter past twelve.
The teenager reached the steps of the Memorial. He saw a dark green van parked between the pillars next to the monumental figure of Lincoln. He paused a moment, waiting to see if someone emerged. There was only a heavy, inert stillness. It was dreadful and he was drawn to it. He dashed up the steps somehow hoping energy and movement would order a world suddenly out of kilter. He tentatively approached the van, but it was locked and empty. The Memorial was deserted.
Michael and Tess got out of their car and started running toward the Memorial. In the distance they saw the vets racing up its steps.
The vets reached the van and the confused teenager.
"What's going on?" a vet asked him.
"I don't know, there's nobody here. You think it's a prank or what?"
The vets tried opening the doors. They were locked.
Michael and Tess caught sight of the van and the group. Michael motioned Tess to get down.
"Dynamite!" Michael screamed as he ran toward the Memorial
The group was stunned as they heard Michael's shout. Panic and indecision. Michael reached the steps to the Memorial. He saw the group trying to push the van off the Memorial.
"Get away! It'll blow any second!"
The group kept pushing. The van wasn't budging. Michael saw the group wasn't budging either.
"Fucking heroes!"
Michael pulled out his gun and dashed up the steps. They had wandered beyond the bounds of reason and he was going to bring them back over the line.
"It's in gear!," a vet yelled to him as he reached the top of the steps. He got a quick look at their faces, which reflected a mixture of confusion, terror and bravery.
He started to point his gun at them, preparing to order them out. He smashed the van window out instead. He opened the door and jumped in. He hurriedly moved the gear in neutral and tried the emergency brake. It was jammed.
The group frantically pushed the van to no avail. Michael wedged his back against the seat and stomped at the lever. One voice inside his head was screaming get the hell out. Another voice was calmly counting off the seconds.
The lever finally gave way. Michael leaped out of the van as it began to move.
He joined the others as they strained against its weight. Slowly it moved backwards toward the pillars. Just a few more feet to the steps and a downhill push. Too late. All movement was eradicated as a brilliant flash of blue-orange light illuminated their horrified faces. Their bodies instinctively stiffened against the coming blast as they looked up. There was a deafening explosion.
A split second later the van was still intact. Across the reflecting pool, the top of the Washington Monument was an exploding fireball casting fragments of aluminum and marble everywhere.
The blast wave shattered the south windows of the White House. The interior was hit by bullets as alarms and sirens wailed.
From the Jefferson Memorial came rounds of armor piercing and tracer bullets from the M2. The tracer bullets burned their way in darkness across the Tidal Basin into the White House.
The group was awestruck. Realizing the van could blow any moment, almost in unison they threw their bodies against it. Slowly the van reached the steps, and down it went gaining speed and momentum. They dove to the ground, covering up, as it rolled harmlessly onto the grass. The van was there an instant, and the next it was completely obliterated by a horrendous explosion. Glass and metal shrapnel were sprayed over the prone bodies.
Michael lifted his head. He saw tracer bullets cross Potomac Park on their way to the White House. The shooting stopped.
Two men inside the van at the Jefferson Memorial hurriedly set a timer on explosives and ran toward the Potomac. A motorboat was waiting for them. They got in and the boat sped them to the other shore.
At the Lincoln Memorial there was the sound of countless sirens as the group slowly got to its feet.
"What's going on?! Why?" the teenager anxiously asked.
"Stay down, there could be more," a vet warned him. Michael shook his head.
"They're finished."
"You got the war plans Schwarzkopf?"
Michael didn't answer. He had just realized he'd seen one of the vets before. He looked around to verify it. The vet had disappeared. This was no place to speculate. There would be cops all over them any moment.
As Tess and Michael got back to the car, they heard another explosion. They got out of the area before there was any coherence to all the law enforcement converging on the government center. Michael sped along a highway to a connection with the beltway. Michael's mind and body were still back at the Memorial and speeding right along with the car.
"We're going in the wrong direction, but at least we're out of there. Another five minutes and we'd have been answering questions until we're dead."
"That first explosion, I thought you were gone."
"I was. I just pissed all over myself and it passed. You know some guys actually get clear headed in situations like that. The rest of their lives are a wreck, but put them in danger like that, it's a day in the country. With me it's still a mess."
"You did help save the Lincoln Memorial."
"Well anything freestanding and over sixty tons, it's a given."
"I'm serious."
"I didn't save anything, it was already saved."
"I don't get it."
"It was all going so fast, but afterwards I realized one of the vets looked familiar. He was in special operations, one of Everett's kind of people. So there was no way he was going to blow it up before we got it off the Memorial. He undoubtedly had a detonator to trigger the thing. So much for saving the Memorial."
"You had no way of knowing."
"All I knew was that I was embarrassed as hell watching those guys trying to push that van. That's it, and that missing vet's sense of timing."
"Everett have a special thing for Lincoln?"
"I'm not sure whether he wanted to save the Memorial or not have extra bodies along the way. Maybe the vet was supposed to set it off on the Memorial, and the teenager and the other vets and yours truly got in the way."
"I'm glad Everett chose this time to get humanitarian. I wonder why."
"Probably to make it clear the enemy is the government not the people. It'll make the government's miscalculated response that much worse."
"I take it we're heading for that airport."
"It's part of his effort to make this whole thing seem like a militia attack.
"Why?"
"So the government will crack down on the militia. Then the militia steps up their war, and we have chaos. Enter Allan March. Everett's had a lot of practice destabilizing other governments, he thought he'd try ours."
"So he's not finished?"
"He's just beginning."
* * *
Tess saw the plane in the sky even before they reached the airport. She pointed it out to Michael. It was still gaining altitude, heading southwest. All they could do was hope it wasn't Everett's. They continued on to the airport. It was deserted. Michael and Tess sat in the darkness and waited. After forty five minutes they knew they had missed them.
They checked out two local motels. It was a small town and the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep and hadn't heard anything yet about Washington. Tess described Everett and the others, pretending to be looking for a group of friends. Tess was very ingratiating, but nobody much appreciated being awakened, and no they hadn't seen anybody like that. The only group through recently besides the local Kiwanis was a Puerto Rican salsa band traveling from a concert in Pittsburgh to one in Philadelphia.
Michael thought it over as they drove to an all night convenience store. The manager and a few late night customers were glued to a tv broadcasting the first reports of the attack. While Tess went to try her contact number, Michael bought a bag of ice and two coffees and waited for her in the car. He wrapped his leg with the ice and tried to work a band of Puerto Ricans into the mix. Tess appeared with more compelling news.
"Kit's definitely alive. He left a message. Sort of paranoid, like he thought someone might be listening. He said if I'm enjoying my vacation, he advised prolonging it. Otherwise I could meet him at three this afternoon."
"That's it?"
Tess nodded.
"What did he sound like besides paranoid?"
"Like he's got something going."
"Where's the meeting?"
"Cambridge."
"What's that about?"
"He has a girlfriend there."
"Okay, but first I want to try to find Sara's source of information while we still can. Hilliard will figure I was the one on the memorial or they'll get my prints off the truck. Everett's vet will tell Everett. There's only limited time before things get too tight to breathe."
* * *
Two hours later, the plane that had taken off as Michael and Tess got to the airport, crashed in a remote part of the Alleghenies. Everett had left explicit instructions as to when the news was to be made public.
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All Rights Reserved