Power Down (54 page)

Calibrisi was silent. Buck felt it, that familiar feeling. When you are someone’s boss, you always own them somehow. He felt Calibrisi’s doubt, coming over the line, expressing itself by the silence.

“It’s Andreas,” continued Buck, driving the point home. “You’re an idiot if you don’t understand the fact that Andreas killed those Deltas. He’s involved. Something happened on that rig. Something went down.
He’s involved with these people somehow, some way. And now that guy is playing us.”

Buck took a right on Glebe, nearly sliding into the guardrail. His home was just a block away now.

“I’m sending a team out to get you,” said Calibrisi.

“You don’t need to,” said Buck. He saw the familiar sign, Kentucky Avenue, swung the car right. “I’m downtown. I’ll come by. You can polygraph me. You can run a pharma package on me.”

Left on Old Dominion. Ahead, he saw the green shutters of his house. He pulled the Jetta around the block, parked on a side street. He turned the car off, then climbed out, began a fast walk down the sidewalk now dusted in snow.

“And then when you’re done,” continued Buck, coming to his front door, “and I’m cleared, and the president knows what kind of circus you’ve been running, I’ll have your job, Hector. And Jessica Tanzer’s too.”

BATH IRON WORKS
BATH, MAINE

Shelly Martini, head of the FBI Portland Regional Field Office, sat in the driver’s seat of the van as it drove, sirens on. They were accompanied by two Bath police cruisers. They exited Route 1, then barreled down the underpass until they reached Washington Street, then went right. In the distance, a massive red and white crane hovered over the shipyard. Lights twinkled in the afternoon gray. A Christmas tree stood atop the crane’s red and white boom, lit up for the holidays.

They had just come from Freeport. L.L. Bean was clean. They had spent the better part of the morning searching through the company’s retail outlet as well as the massive distribution center down the street. They had also looked at surrounding retailers in the area. Nothing.

They parked in a line next to the main entrance to Bath Iron Works, the Kennebec River in the background. They were met by yet more squad cars. The head of BIW security, Jim Brueggelman, met the arriving convoy.

“Hi, Shelly.” Brueggelman, an obese man with a big, bushy mustache, walked to Martini, shook her hand. “Is this related to Long Beach?”

“Yes,” Martini said. “We found the same explosive used at Long Beach in a UPS package in Reno. It was being sent to a P.O. box in Brunswick.”

“Okay. Where do you want to start?”

“What’s the most important part of the facility?”

“It’s all important, Shelly.”

“Well, then, where are the most employees?”

“Let’s start with the engine works,” said Brueggelman, pointing to a huge green building down the street that towered over the street. “There’s an Aegis there right now. If I was one of these terrorists, that’s what I’d try to hit. Then we’ll get over to the dry dock.”

“Sounds good,” said Martini. “How much trouble would it be to shut things down for an hour or two?”

“Shut things down?” asked Brueggelman, momentarily taken aback. “Major pain in the ass. But if you want it, you got it.”

“Do it,” said Martini.

Brueggelman nodded. “Okay. Give me a few minutes.”

David stood atop the steel scaffold. He pressed the sander hard against the steel shank, moving to smooth out a ridge that was still too rough. Suddenly, the bright overhead lights of the massive warehouse flashed red. He knew what it meant. He’d participated in the exercises.
Evacuation.

For a full minute, he remained atop the scaffold, taking his time to disengage from the equipment. A line of workers began to pour toward the door. Was it routine, just an exercise? Or did they know?

“Hey, Davie.” It was Dickie Roman, walking from the engine works toward the line of men exiting the building. “What do you think’s up?”

David looked at him from the scaffold, said nothing. In the distance, he saw the sign for the restrooms.

“Jesus, lookie there,” said Roman, pointing to the far end of the building behind David.

David turned. Against the wall, a line of uniformed officers suddenly entered the warehouse. A large, black German shepherd was led by the officer in front; David knew what it meant. Long Beach. They knew. They had to know. He glanced back at Dickie. To the right, he saw Mark Jonas, his supervisor, pointing toward the line.

He thought back to his training.

If they suspect you, you must become a martyr.

“Hurry it up, David,” Jonas said.

David started to climb down from the scaffold. At the bottom step, he stepped toward the line of departing workers, then suddenly lurched away from the line. He sprinted wildly toward the restroom. Mark Jonas began to yell, then gave chase, as did several other men. The team of FBI agents took notice, and the large German shepherd, now halfway across the facility floor, began barking furiously, then was let go and galloped toward the fleeing David.

David sprinted down the corridor, his arms pumping in a frenzy, looking back every few steps over his shoulder as the angry dog, followed by the crowd, gave chase. He burst into the empty restroom, dashing to the fourth stall. He climbed on top of the toilet. The angry barking of the dog echoed down the corridor, closing in, along with shouting. He pushed the ceiling tile aside and reached up, feeling around the mass of explosive material, searching desperately for the detonator.

The door to the restroom burst open. The animal’s angry, rabid barking sent a chill down David’s spine. He continued feeling through the thick wad of octanitrocubane, searching for the buried object. The German shepherd was now inside the restroom, his barking feral, crazed. Suddenly, the door to the stall burst open and the large, ferocious animal leapt toward him, saliva dripping from his mouth, yellowish teeth bared to bite. David’s hands suddenly found the object, and he pulled the two end cap wires out from the material, just as the sharp fangs punctured his leg, ripping his flesh in a horrendously painful final moment.

The dog ripped mercilessly into David’s leg just as he touched the ends of the wires together.

BATH IRON WORKS

Across the street from Bath Iron Works, the Cabin was hopping. The restaurant, a dark and cozy pizza place, was a popular hangout for the employees of BIW, their families and friends. In the summer, it would fill up early with vacationers. In winter, it was the Bath community, especially the workers from BIW, who kept the place afloat.

On this afternoon, the Cabin was packed with BIW workers who now had an hour or two to kill while the FBI searched the facility. Beer flowed freely as waitresses shuttled pitchers to the different tables. In one room, the sound of a guitar could be heard, a fast, folksy tune, the high, pretty voice of a woman covering a Joni Mitchell tune.

BIW’s massive green warehouse sat directly across the street from the restaurant, completely blocking any view of the Kennebec River the place might have had. When BIW built the six-story-tall facility in the early 1970s, the couple that owned the small house that the Cabin now occupied became angry at losing their beautiful view of the river. They sold the place to Joe and Betty Wilson for $8,000 and felt fortunate to get out of the whole deal with anything at all. But Joe Wilson saw an opportunity. He turned the downstairs of the place into a restaurant and opened the Cabin. It soon became a staple in the lives of the community,
a gathering place, a neighborhood pub, a place for good pizza, laughter, a place to relax.

Had anyone survived the explosion, they could have described the moment that it occurred. It was a moment in the middle of the young female singer’s performance of “Big Yellow Taxi.” The guitarist had stopped unexpectedly, at the same time the young woman paused mid-lyric. At this particular moment, at each table, conversation was abruptly interrupted. In the kitchen, both cooks looked up from their pizza doughs. Several of the waitresses stopped walking and looked toward the door. They all could have described that moment, had any of them survived.

But none of them did. For seconds before, two small metal wires were suddenly connected together, the combination of the wires sending a precise charge down through the stainless-steel tubing of the detonator and into the large chunk of octanitrocubane, hidden above a ceiling tile in one of the twenty-four bathrooms inside the BIW Aegis manufacturing facility.

The ion spark from the detonator illuminated the mass of material in a flash moment and after that all else was void.

From the bathroom ceiling, the infinite heat moved like a thousand lightning bolts in all directions; it was like being at the very genesis of the lightning bolt itself, and it moved with such force and power that soon the large area surrounding the bathroom, the manufacturing zone for the Aegis engine works, was a wild, hazy inferno of heat and fierce wind that toppled everything, including the massive engine blocks.

So fast was the pace of the explosion that none of the departing workers in the immediate area of the blast, nor the FBI agents who’d just arrived, had even a moment of recognition before they were pulverized into vapor.

From there, the explosion tore down through the warehouse, washing away hundreds of workers without warning. At the far end of the massive facility, workers had mere seconds, but they were enough, moments filled with awe as the south side of the warehouse, where the explosion emanated from, lit up white and silver and ripped their way. Those seconds
were soon meaningless, for the force of the explosion soon reached them, killing them all.

As the heat spread, the massive corrugated steel walls of the facility buckled at their joints and soon toppled over, bringing with them the roof overhead, all within seconds, their massive height and weight acting like tissue paper trying to stop a forest fire.

And when the walls went, the fire, heat, and wind pulsed into the Bath air, exploding outward. Thundering across the small road, it moved into the neighborhoods surrounding the facility.

And all of this happened in less than two seconds.

At the Cabin, it was the noise that caused the moment. None of them knew that. All they knew is that there was a moment, and they all shared that moment, the moment less than a second after David had touched the wires together, and less than a second before two-thousand-degree heat leveled the small neighborhood restaurant as the inferno moved furiously through the snow-filled air.

Soon, the southern part of the small coastal city was aflame. Nearly two square miles of land, the epicenter of which was BIW, settled into a raging series of fires in a concentric circle around the crater.

17 OLD DOMINION
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

Marks and Savoy climbed into the back of a black Toyota Land Cruiser idling on the tarmac of the private terminal at Reagan National Airport. Spinale drove, tearing out of the terminal, headed toward Alexandria. For several minutes, no one said a word.

The car radio was tuned to the news, more reports on Long Beach. They listened for several minutes as Spinale hauled quickly toward Alexandria. Finally, Marks leaned forward from the backseat.

“Turn the radio off,” he said.

On the seat next to him, he opened a leather briefcase. He pulled out the Wilson Combat CQB, the silencer still in place. He pushed a clip into the gun and continued to stare silently out the side window.

“You sure you don’t want me and Paul to handle this?” asked Savoy from the front passenger seat. Marks returned his question with silence; Savoy knew to not ask that question a second time.

“I’m going to ask this one more time just to make sure we’re thinking clearly,” said Savoy. “Should we tell Jessica Tanzer and let them deal with this?”

Marks said nothing for several moments. Finally, he stopped staring out the window.

“I could sit here and think up plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t tell the FBI,” said Marks. “They might fuck up the case. Some government prosecutor would probably get flambéed by the kind of lawyer this guy would hire. That’s if they even bring him to trial. They’d probably cut a deal with him long before that. He’d end up in some white-collar country club prison for a few years, or else witness protection, live out his days on a golf course in Arizona. I could probably think of a few more reasons why we shouldn’t tell the FBI.”

“But—” said Savoy.

“But the real reason we’re not going to tell Jessica Tanzer is simple,” continued Marks, anger rising in his voice. “There are certain human beings who deserve to die.”

Buck entered through the side door of the white Colonial. Green shutters, a pair of Japanese maples in the front yard, between which ran a stone walkway.

The neighborhood was called Beverley Hills, a residential neighborhood just a few miles from downtown Alexandria. The residents were upper middle class; lawyers, doctors, finance types, a few dual income government couples. People knew their neighbors. Kids could play in the street without fear.

The house was empty, his wife, Debbie, a fifth-grade teacher, still at school.

Upstairs, Buck pulled out the small leather Coach weekend bag and frantically placed a few items in it, toiletries, a change of clothing. He went into the walk-in closet off the master bedroom. He pulled a chair from against the wall and stood under the overhead light. He jimmied the metal sides of the light fixture, creating enough room for his fingertips. He pulled the light fixture down. He reached his fingertips up blindly. Stuffed in the space above the metal casing, he felt two small objects. He pulled them out then pushed the light housing back into place. He stepped down and replaced the chair against the wall.