Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1) (16 page)

“They don’t want to go to war with Iran,” Luke said.

Ed shrugged. “Can’t say I blame them. War is hell.”

The signalman on the helipad waved to Luke and Ed with bright orange wands, giving them the green light. They ducked low and ran for the helicopter. There was only one active pad at this entrance, and they were moving the choppers in and out, two minutes or less.

No sooner were Luke and Ed inside the chopper than it took off again. Ed yanked the door shut twenty feet above the ground. Luke sank into the seat and clipped his safety belt. They were alone inside a machine built to carry eight passengers. A lot of people in civilian government were flying out of Washington, DC, to Mount Weather. Not too many were flying back into the city.

He glanced at his watch. It was 12:35. More than eleven hours since Don had called him. About thirty hours since he had awakened yesterday morning. Counting the couple of times he had dozed off, he probably hadn’t slept thirty minutes since yesterday.

They rose above the sprawling bunker complex. It fell away behind them and soon the view was of green woods and low, rugged mountains. The sky was black with helicopters waiting for their turn to land. Looking east, there was an almost unbroken line of helicopters in the air, single file, all the way to the horizon. Luke glanced at the ground. There was a highway down there. The westbound lanes were bumper-to-bumper, choked with traffic. In the eastbound lanes, a handful of cars zoomed along.

“It’ll be a good night for the motel business in West Virginia,” Ed said.

“Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina,” Luke said. “There probably won’t be an empty room for two hundred miles.”

Ed nodded. “And a lot of people sleeping in cars.”

Luke looked at Ed’s face. He had washed up in the men’s room, so at least he was clean. But the Secret Service had roughed him up, worse than they did Luke. Maybe it was payback for knocking out two of their agents at the Oval Office. Maybe it was because he was black. Hard to say. But his eye was mostly swollen shut now. He had a couple of darkish lumps on his jaw line that were going to bruise up nicely. And he looked tired. Drained.

“Man, you look like shit.”

Ed shrugged. “You should see the other guy.”

“You going to file a worker’s comp claim?”

Ed shook his head. He smiled. “No, I’ll probably just sue you for reckless endangerment. How’s your malpractice insurance? Up to date?”

Luke laughed. “Good luck with that. By the way, we’re not suspended anymore.”

Ed raised an eyebrow. “Was I ever suspended?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you were. Maybe you weren’t. But you’re not now. Also, you have a new boss.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

Luke stared down at the highway. The traffic jam went on as far as the eye could see. “The President of the United States of America,” he said.

1:15 p.m.

McLean, Virginia - Headquarters of the Special Response Team

Luke had never really looked at Don Morris’s photos before. The walls in his office were covered in them. Then again, Luke had never really stood around in Don’s office with nothing to do before, either. Don was usually here when Luke walked in.

The photos were amazing. In one photo, a much younger Don was standing with Arnold Schwarzenegger, demonstrating to the actor a big MK-19 grenade gun. In a newer one, Don was putting a jiu-jitsu move on Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg was inverted, his legs in the air, his head on its way to a safety mat. Luke knew that Don sometimes consulted with Hollywood, helping to make their celluloid fakery seem vaguely realistic.

There was more. Here was Don, receiving what looked like a Bronze Star from Jimmy Carter. Here he was shaking hands with Ronald Reagan. Here was one with Bill Clinton. Here was one of Don with a paternal arm around Susan Hopkins. And another of Don standing near a river with the current Speaker of the House, both men wearing fly-fishing gear. Here was Don addressing a Congressional committee.

Luke sensed a presence behind him in the room.

“Hello, son,” Don said.

“Hi, Don. Great pictures.” Luke turned to face him. “You get around, eh?”

Don came all the way into the room. He wore a dress shirt and slacks. His body language was relaxed, but his eyes were sharp. He sat behind his big desk, and gestured to the chair facing it.

“Have a seat. Take a load off.”

Luke did.

“Politics…” Don said, “…is war by other means. Networking is a big part of how I’ve kept this place going. Our people do a great job, but if the big-wigs don’t know about it, then we’re out of work. To the bean counters, we are a line item, about as important as the one marked Miscellaneous.”

“Okay,” Luke said.

“I see you got a shower,” Don said. “Freshened up a bit?”

Luke nodded. The shower facilities here were first rate. And he kept two changes of clothes in his locker, even while he was on leave. He wasn’t feeling a hundred percent, but he was a lot better than before.

“Close call today, huh?”

“I guess we’ve had closer ones,” Luke said.

Don smiled. “Either way, I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Luke returned the smile. “Me too.”

“We still partners?” Don said.

Luke wasn’t sure how to answer that. They had been together a long time. Until today, there had never been a moment, not one, when Luke thought Don didn’t have his back. Today there had been two such moments. And in both cases, Don’s instincts had been wrong. Don had been skating in one direction, and the puck had been sliding off at full speed in the other direction. If Luke had listened to Don, then the President, the Vice President, and a lot of other people would have died.

It was a profound change, much like seeing an iceberg the size of Kentucky calve away from Antarctica and fall into the ocean. It was a huge thing to witness, but the implications of it were even bigger.

Maybe Don was getting old after all. Maybe he was seeing the Special Response Team collapse all around him, this organization he had built over ten years, and he was scared. Maybe its demise was giving him a whiff of his own mortality. Maybe it was clouding his judgment. Luke was willing to believe these things.

“We’ll always be partners,” Luke said.

“Good,” Don said. “Now listen, you’re still under suspension. I haven’t been able to budge them at all. I think they’ll rescind it, but it may be a day or two, so I’m going to send you home. You okay with that?”

“Don—”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, son. You were on leave anyway. After everything you’ve done, you deserve a couple of days off. Hell, you look like something the cat dragged in here.”

“I have new orders, Don.”

Don’s face was firm. “On whose authority?”

Luke looked him directly in the eyes. “The President’s. He told me to continue pursuing the leads we had this morning, and then report back to his security team at Mount Weather. I’d like to do that with the people here at SRT, but he told me if I had any trouble, they’d put Secret Service resources at my disposal.”

Don smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. Luke felt a small twinge about that. SRT was teetering on the brink, and now the President was taking Don’s agents. Even so, Don needed to man up. This wasn’t about egos or agency budgets. This was about getting a job done.

Don looked at the top of his desk. “Well, if the President ordered it, I don’t see how I can say no. I don’t see how the FBI Director can, either. Until I hear otherwise, you have whatever you need.”

*

Trudy Wellington’s disembodied head appeared on the flat-panel wall monitor.

Luke, Ed Newsam, Don Morris, and half a dozen members of the Special Response Team sat in the conference room. Real food was spread out on the long black table—sandwiches from the delicatessen less than a mile from headquarters. Luke’s was corned beef and sauerkraut on pumpernickel bread.

He glanced at Ed. Ed had also showered and changed. He wore a black SRT jumpsuit now. He held a cold pack to his eye. He had devoured two sandwiches and had a large mug of coffee in front of him. The mug was black with red lettering: JET FUEL. Ed looked alert, immense, formidable—a different man from half an hour ago. Outside of the busted face and the swollen eye, he was very much the same man Luke had met that morning.

“Can you guys hear me okay?” Trudy said.

“We hear you fine,” Don said.

“Video output look all right?”

“Looks good to me. Is Swann there with you?”

“He’s right behind me. He established this uplink.”

“Good,” Don said. “What do you have for us?”

“Well, we’ve got chaos,” Trudy said. “The National Guard has been mobilized. Every single vehicle, at every bridge and tunnel out of Manhattan, is being searched. The traffic is gridlock everywhere. Tow trucks are clearing out parked cars to open lanes for emergency vehicles. The police have the subways and commuter rails on lockdown. One entrance and exit at each subway station is open, and every person coming in searched. Every single bag is being opened. The lines are several blocks long. The crowds in Times Square became so large that the police closed the subway station there and cleared the square. At least ten thousand people are walking north toward Central Park. Reports of vandalism, mostly smashed shop windows, are widespread in that area.”

“What else?” Don said.

“As we speak, hundreds of thousands of people are walking across the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, 59
th
Street, George Washington, and 138
th
Street bridges out of Manhattan. It looks like September eleventh all over again. Mostly, people are calm, but I hate to think what this place would be like if the attack had happened here.”

“Any word on that laundry van?” Luke said. “We don’t know what radioactive materials were used in the attack on the White House. With the van still at large, there’s always the possibility of a second attack.”

“We’re on that,” Trudy said. “Eldrick Thomas, remember him?  He was found in a parking lot along Baltimore Harbor. That lot is right off an exit ramp from I-95. It’s a hot-spot of drug trafficking and prostitution, so the Baltimore police have surveillance cameras at the top and bottom of the driveway leading to the lot. The camera at the bottom, which is right at the parking lot entrance, has been disabled, probably by the very people it’s meant to monitor. The camera at the top is still functional. Swann, can you load those videos?”

The display monitor went to split-screen. On the left side, Trudy was looking back at something out of sight of the camera. On the right side, grainy video footage appeared. It showed a four-lane road at a stoplight. The road was empty.

“We just got this half an hour ago,” Trudy said. “For whatever reason, Baltimore PD was reluctant to give it up. There was a moment when I thought we were going to have to go to a federal judge.”

As they watched, a white delivery van came onto the screen. The logo on the side of the van was clear.
Dun-Rite Laundry Services.
The van turned right, which made it face the camera directly.

“Okay, Swann, stop it right there,” Trudy said. “You can see the license plate. It’s grainy, but we made it out. New York commercial plate, AN1-2NL. The same plates that were on the van when we first caught it on camera near Center Medical Center. Now watch when it leaves.”

The video skipped, and the van disappeared. In a moment, it was back, this time facing away from the camera. Luke could make out an orange blur where the license plate would be.

“This is twenty minutes later,” Trudy said. “See the plate? It’s a New York residential plate, 10G-4PQ. Now watch as the van turns left to get back on the highway. See that? The laundry logo is gone. Very clever.”

“So what are we doing about it?” Luke said.

“There are APBs with every municipal police force in a three hundred mile radius. Maryland and Virginia State Police helicopters are in the air with still images from these videos, scanning every white van on the roads.”

“What if they garaged it?” Ed said.

Trudy shook her head. “It won’t matter. The past eight hours of footage from every single traffic camera in Maryland and Virginia has been outsourced to a company in India. Right now, four hundred people in Delhi are watching videotaped traffic with one task: look at every white van, and find the one with orange New York license plates that say 10G-4PQ. Bonuses for the workers, and the company, are triggered by how fast they find it, and not by how many hours they put in. Someone is going to spot that van very soon, and once they do, it’ll be a simple matter to track every single street light it passes until it stops.”

“Whoever is in that van is going to be desperate,” Luke said. “They’ve already lost two of their guys. If they get the sense we’re closing in, they’re likely to blow themselves up. When someone finds that van, I want us, meaning SRT, on the scene. We need to take those people alive.”

“We’re going to do the best we can,” Trudy said. “But we had to open it up. There are fifty police forces with this information, and a dozen intelligence agencies. If we kept it to ourselves, the danger is we would never find it.”

“I understand that,” Luke said. “But if we take the Little Bird, we can be anywhere and land almost anywhere pretty quickly. Just give us some warning.”

“Will do,” she said.

“Now what about Ali Nassar?”

“For that, you need to talk to Swann.”

Trudy disappeared and Mark Swann’s face appeared. “Luke, we sent a three-man team up to extract Nassar from his apartment. Unfortunately, they got there a few minutes late. When they arrived Nassar was already leaving with a security contingent from the Iranian mission. They were armed, showing their weapons. We didn’t want to risk a shoot-out on the street, and frankly, our guys were out-numbered and out-gunned.”

“Where did they go?”

“This was before the White House was attacked, so street traffic was pretty open. They came downtown and brought Nassar inside the Iranian mission on Third Avenue. The place is locked up tight. It would take an army, plus some casualties, to get in there and bring him out. Short of a declaration of war, we’re not going to do it, and even if we did, we’d probably find him dead.”