Project Sparta (The Xander Whitt Series Book 1) (19 page)

Chapter 36

Capitol Hill

Washington, DC

July 3
rd
2016

Morning dawned over Capitol Hill as an unassuming white van pulled up to the guard station. A Capitol policeman approached the driver’s side door while another took an extended mirror and swept the bottom of the van for explosives. The first guard’s hand rose and knocked on the window, while the other steadied a clipboard with the day’s appointments. The window slowly cranked down, revealing a redheaded man with a big, bushy mustache, wearing a thin skullcap despite the DC summer heat.

“Morning,” the guard said with the droning tone of the morning.

“Top of the morning to ya.” The jovial Irish brogue startled the guard, who had obviously not yet had his coffee.

“What company are you with?”

“Mickey’s AC Repair, ‘The Coolest Cat in Town.’” Seamus repeated the company slogan like a used-car salesman.

“And you must be…?”

“Mickey O’Toole!” Seamus stuck his hand out of the window to shake the guard’s hand. The guard, half-startled and half-bewildered, shook the strange man’s hand.

Mickey O’Toole was one of Seamus’s favorite covers. Tobias and Mac played Mickey’s associates as they sat next to him in the front of the van. Seamus had invested a great deal in the character of Mickey and often had fun with the outlandish behavior that the alias afforded him. Seamus had even repaired AC units around town over the years to establish the cover. Mickey’s was a legitimate business with all the necessary permits, licenses, and even a tax return, making it much easier to infiltrate homes, offices, or, in this case, the Russell House Office Building on Capitol Hill.

The guard looked at Tobias and Mac and then toward the bumper of the van with suspicion. The second guard had just finished his sweep and gave a
good-to-go
nod. The first guard scrolled down his clipboard and located Mickey’s AC on the appointment sheet. What he did not know was that Charlie Dugard, the building’s manager, did not call in the order. Mac had cloned the caller ID and used his best smoker’s voice to impersonate Mr. Dugard.

The guard eyed Seamus’s bushy features and scanned the van once more. Seamus flashed a wide grin. He knew that random searches were often performed but hoped the guard would lack motivation to perform one this early in the morning. The guard stood a moment.

              “All right, let’s open the back up,” he said slapping the side of the van. Seamus hopped out of the driver’s seat and proceeded to the back of the van.

“Are you sure that you want to do this?” he asked. The guard’s eyebrows shot up immediately and his posture changed to a challenging stance.

“Am I sure? Yes, I’m sure. Now open the van.” A third guard approached with an M16. Seamus brushed his hair back with his hand and started laughing through a goofy smile. Together the three guards steadied themselves at the back door of the van. With a confirming nod to each other, he brought his hand up to the door handle and pulled.

The door swung open.

The opened door revealed the contents of the back of the van: standard air conditioning supplies hung on a set of pegboards on the van’s interior walls and vacuum hoses, filters, and basic repair tools were scattered about.

“I’m just playing with ya.” Seamus cackled in character. The guard looked around confused and uncomfortable and nodded him along with an attitude.

“You Americans have beautiful buildings and freedom and great-looking women, but no sense of humor.” Seamus shook his head and loaded back up in the driver’s seat as the guard returned to his post.

A set of steel pillars descended into the ground, opening the driveway to traffic. The white van crept past the guard house and down First Street NE, which ran between the Russell House Office Building and the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The van rolled to a parking spot alongside Russell and Seamus, Mac, and Tobias climbed into the back.

“W-w-was that-t-t nece-ss-ss-sary?” Tobias stuttered and jittered as if trying to shake off the nerves of the field.

“It wasn’t me! It was Mickey. Sometimes I can’t control him,” Seamus explained in jest.

After looking out the back tinted window to confirm that no one had followed them, Mac flipped the pegboard around to reveal a wall of computer monitors and surveillance equipment. He opened the internal compartment of the vacuum cleaners and booted up the CPU and wireless routers hiding inside. Tobias started preparations at his station. He pulled down the pegboard on the other wall of the van into a small desk, which held blueprints of the building and a schedule of movements. He pulled the pencil from his ear and struck through the top line of the list:
8:30 -Infiltrate and set up shop
.

His eyes ran down the list to the next item on the schedule:
8:34 Ashton - Cannon
.

«————————»

Across Capitol Hill, a sexy, young professional walked through the Cannon House Office Building door and approached the immediate metal detector at the entryway. She wore a conservative pantsuit with a blouse unbuttoned to the sternum and curled blond hair that fell below her shoulders. She had a smoldering layer of black eye liner and dark purple eye shadow. Her breasts were propped up by socks in her bra, popping her cleavage out of her button-down blouse. Eyes turned as she approached the security checkpoint.

She flashed her badge to the Capitol Police and placed her purse on the conveyor belt that rolled through the x-ray machine. The guard eyed her up and down, not with suspicion but with appetite. Ashton smirked as she walked through security, uninterested, as if she were on autopilot. It was the unexcited air of importance that a popular girl would wear in high school. She walked through the rotunda, past the pillars and statues of the main foyer. When she reached the hallway, she folded her jacket’s lapel over where she had a brooch with a hidden microphone pinned. She spoke into the brooch.

“I’m in.”

«————————»

A pair of shiny black shoes clicked down the marble hallway of the Russell House Office Building. The man’s black pants maintained their perfect pleat through his walk. His shirt was tucked in and pressed. His black tie swung from side to side like a clock ticking life away while his coat hugged his sides, making him appear more slender. From behind a pair of black aviator sunglasses, a set of eyes zeroed in on an office door. He opened it and walked through.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” a voice asked. She almost sounded scared.

“I’m here on behalf of my employer,” the man said with an insidious growl.

The door closed behind showing the nameplate:
Sen. Helen Bashfield
.

«————————»

Seamus hopped down from the truck in his blue overalls with a stitched
Mickey’s AC Repair
logo embroidered on his chest. He carried a toolbox and proceeded behind a row of Littleleaf Lindens that offered cover. He passed under their shade and approached the large air conditioning vent on the exterior of the building. He kneeled down in front of the vent and produced a flathead screwdriver, which he used to unscrew the vent screen. The grate swung open like a door and a large air-conditioning duct extended into the darkness. Seamus looked deep down into the duct and folded back the tray in his toolbox, revealing a small helicopter drone. It was a gadget he had designed himself to navigate close quarters. The drone’s propellers started to turn under the faint hum of its motor. The lights attached to it illuminated and the camera began sending a live feed to the flight controller Seamus held. He released the helicopter and it flew into the darkness of the duct, directed via remote control. He closed the vent and returned to the van where he heard communication coming over his earpiece.

“En route,” said Jooles.

«————————»

Jooles wore black-rimmed glasses and a striped shirt that was half-professional and half-casual. Her skin-tight cropped Levi’s ended right above her ankles. Her hipster styled screamed millennial, one of those young girls trying a little too hard to be individualistic. Her cover was a blogger and she already found the pants to be a physical hindrance. Jooles had passed through security with the badge Hardy had provided and perched on a bench in the rotunda before the hallway leading to Senator Bashfield’s office, earbuds in ears and iPhone in hand. The communication with the team spoke through her headphones. She surveyed the rotunda and the herds of professionals filing into work.

“We’re clear here, Xander.”

«————————»

Outside on a bench, reading the newspaper next to a cup of cappuccino was a young blond man dressed in a sleek, modern suit. He heard Jooles’s update through an earpiece hidden in his headphones. He checked his watch and recounted the mission itinerary. Tapping his Bluetooth, Xander spoke a directive to the team.

“Hold your position. Waiting on surveillance.”

«————————»

“Yeah, I bloody hear ya! It’s harder than it looks,” Seamus barked from behind the steering wheel of the van as he maneuvered his drone through the maze of air conditioning ducts. Tobias peered over his shoulder to chart the device’s progress as he consulted the blueprint.

“You’re going to take your second right,” Tobias guided him.

Seamus’s hands steadied and his eyes focused on the video feed on his controller. He hadn’t hit a wall yet, but he had come close a couple of times. He guided the chopper forward and past the first right, which led over a different row of offices. The drone then came to the second right, and Seamus guided it to turn.

But the propeller clipped the wall.

Sweat dripped down Seamus’s nose as the drone sent a loud, echoing bang running through the duct and over many offices. His hands shook and his knuckles turned white as his grip on the controller tightened, his concentration focused on evening out the chopper’s propellers. After many minor adjustments, he was able to do so with little harm done to the device. He eased the chopper’s flight, exhaled, and guided it down the second right that Tobias had indicated.

“You’re going to want to land facing the east wall in thirty feet,” Tobias ordered. Seamus landed the little chopper and powered down the propellers. An arm extended from the chopper and reached up toward a panel with four screws. Seamus directed the arm with a joystick as if he was playing a claw game at an arcade. He directed the chopper to unscrew the four screws and the panel fell off, sending another screeching crash through the air ducts.

“W-w-want me t-t-to drive?” Tobias asked over his shoulder.

“I got it!” Seamus snapped at the backseat driver over his shoulder.

The mechanical arm of Seamus’s drone extended forward and reached through the opened panel to a row of wires tangled throughout the electrical unit. Seamus zoomed the camera in on the different wires.

“You w-want-t-t the g-g-green one,” Tobias said over his shoulder. He watched as Seamus directed the chopper’s arm through the different wires until it found the green one. “And… cl-cl-clamp.”

Seamus stopped the arm and turned toward Tobias with a cold stare. Tobias backed off, and Seamus pushed a button on the controller that made the arm clamp down the green wire.

“Connection established,” Mac chimed from the back of the van as he saw the surveillance feeds of the Capitol populate a series of windows on his computer.

«————————»

“Ashton, give me your status,” Xander said over the team’s communication.

“Four minutes out.”

Ashton’s blond hair danced in the breeze as she rode the Capitol underground train through the tunnels below Capitol Hill. The train looked like a carnival ride for kids, but it was the quickest way to cover ground. She was on the perimeter so she would start from the outside and work her way in. The blue train came to a stop and she stepped off. She walked through the station toward the underground rotunda, which had elevators that led to the first floor. She had just entered the Russell Senate Office Building from its subterranean level.

«————————»

The man in the black suit and tie walked out of Senator Helen Bashfield’s office. He checked his watch and saw a dime-sized red stain on his cuff. He licked his thumb and pressed it on the stain, trying to rub it out. The spot didn’t fade, but continued to seep into the threads of the fabric. He tugged his coat sleeve down to cover it, pulled a pair of black sunglasses over his eyes, and sauntered down the hallway. Passing Jooles on the bench, he walked out of the office building, unnoticed.

«————————»

“I’m on my way, as well,” Xander’s reported through the team’s earpieces. He knew that timing was crucial. They had designed their movements to cover strategic ground on the way to the office.