The President's Assassin (24 page)

This might be a bad moment to mention my military rank, so I said, “Good morning, General. I’m Sean Drummond with the Central Intelligence Agency. This is Special Agent Jennifer Margold, the Senior Agent in Charge for National Security from the Washington office.”

We stepped forward and shook his hand. He said, with remarkable prescience, “Well, I won’t say it’s nice to meet you. But would you care to sit?”

A pair of Rotarian chairs were in front of his desk, and we chose to sit. Without further ado, I informed him, “We’re dealing with an emergency. I’ll cut to the chase. I have bad news.”

He smiled grimly. “Oh...I’m counting on that.”

I did not smile back. “Perhaps you heard on the evening news that Merrill Benedict was murdered on the beltway. And a few minutes later, a Supreme Court justice was slain on his own doorstep.”

“I heard. And the White House Chief of Staff was massacred in his house yesterday morning. The city’s going nuts—I got it.” He pointed at me and said, “What I don’t get is what this has to do with Army CID.”

“That would be the part you didn’t hear on the news—Merrill Benedict was murdered with a LAW and Phillip Fineberg with a Bouncing Betty mine, modified into a command-detonated device.”

Long silence. Eventually, the general said, “Shit.”

“Enough to bury everybody. Don’t worry about it.”

But he obviously was worried about it. “You’re positive these were U.S. military munitions? Russian and French hardware often find their way inside our borders. Both countries produce weapons analogous to the LAW and the Bouncing Betty.”

“Traces of Composition A5 were on Fineberg’s corpse—the distinctive propellant used with Bouncing Bettys.” I allowed him a brief moment to mull that, then added, “As I hope your duty officer informed you, the killers vowed to assassinate the President. So you might say we’re a little concerned about how they got these weapons, and about their access to other military munitions—types, quantities, and so forth.”

General Tingle was a cool customer and took this understatement in stride. He stared at me. “All right. So this is...serious. Now, tell me why you—the CIA—are involved?”

“Because there’s some chance this involves foreign terrorists.”

He nodded. “Time line?”

“If they’re true to their word, they’ll try to kill the President within the next twenty-four hours.”

“You believe this is credible?”

“They just filled two morgues. Don’t you?”

He turned to Colonel Johnson. “Al, how long will it take you to scrub the files?”

But before Johnson could reply, I said, “Our FBI friends already did that. We have good reason to believe the weapons were acquired within the last six months, and our other assumptions are fairly obvious. There are three cases that meet our parameters.”

I read the case file numbers and dates off my palm to Colonel Johnson, who left to gather the files. Apparently reading my mind, the general ordered coffee, and an aide left to scrounge a pot from the duty officer. The general looked at me and said, “Do you have military experience, Mr. Drummond?”

“I...yes, some.”

“Then let me put this in perspective. Right now, we have two wars going on, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army is shipping equipment and munitions at rates not seen since Vietnam. Visit the port at Galveston...it’s like wandering through the aisles of some military Wal-Mart. Thousands of tons of artillery shells, main gun tank rounds, track pads, and spare parts pass out of that port every month.”

“Meaning we...
you
have security problems?” I was having a little trouble with my pronouns.

“We have a security nightmare. Three-quarters of the Army’s active, reserve, and National Guard MPs are in Iraq. Nearly all the Army’s logistics specialists and security specialists are there, or Afghanistan. We’re outsourcing security to civilian firms. They’re hiring guys off the street, paying them $8.90 an hour, and begging them not to let their cousins walk through and filch a few M16s.”

“But these are mines and LAWs,” Jennie noted.

The general nodded. “Let me be frank. We don’t really know how much is getting ripped off, or lost, or misplaced. And for obvious reasons we can’t halt the train to find out. Sometimes, nobody discovers anything missing until the shipping container gets to Iraq or Afghanistan and it’s opened and inventoried. Sometimes the guy doing the inventory arbitrarily decides it’s just a bookkeeping error. Or he’s lazy and doesn’t feel like doing the paperwork to report the missing item. And when it’s discovered missing overseas, there’s always the questions of how, where it was stolen, and when—here, en route, or over there.” He paused, and then added, “So what gets detected, and what gets reported to us, and what we choose to report to the FBI, could be a fraction of what’s missing.”

I traded glances with Jennie. Not good. The weapons could provide us a lead we desperately needed, and we definitely needed to learn what kind of nasty surprises Barnes might have in store. A lot of things go boom in the night, but some booms turn night into day.

But the general had another point to make. “During peacetime, our accountability, and our follow-up to thefts and losses, are exceptionally good. But what’s seriously important in times of peace often becomes trivial when people are fighting and dying. So don’t get your hopes up.”

Incidentally, I found it both instructive and disconcerting to be on the other side of the table, observing the behavior of military officers through civilian eyes. The military is a brotherhood, or, these days, I guess, a brother-sisterhood. Even though most of the men in this room dressed like civilians, and even looked like civilians, they did not think or act like civilians. Jennie and I were here to stick our noses into an institutional embarrassment, and from their aloofness, shifty gazes, and occasional conversational hesitations, clearly we were not part of the tribe, nor were our efforts appreciated. Nobody was going to lie or deliberately misinform us, but getting the full truth could prove difficult.

I kicked Jennie under the table. She looked up at me, and I twirled my finger through the air. It took a moment before she got it. She reached into her pocket, withdrew her tape recorder, and placed it on the table. The officers all stared at it. She did not turn it on, but it sat there, a warning that only truth better be spoken inside this room.

Jennie smiled at them and said, “A completely harmless formality.”

It didn’t go over particularly well.

Anyway, we chitchatted a while about the murders, and I offered them a condensed version of the Jason Barnes story while we waited for Colonel Johnson to return with those three files. The coffee came and my mood brightened.

Despite his job title, General Tingle, it turned out, was a fairly amiable and even charming guy, with a good gift for gab, and he even tried out a few jokes on us, though his timing was off and they came off a little flat. You could tell he was a little unfocused and stressed, thinking ahead about how it was going to look for Uncle Sam’s Army when word got out that weapons intended to kill Al-Qaeda assholes and bad Iraqis had been used to exterminate important members of the U.S. executive and judiciary branches.

For some weird reason, I thought of the inscription on the side of the directional Claymore mine that reads, “Point this side toward the enemy.” Yet in every conflict there is always the guy who’s exhausted or nervous or hurrying, and the enemy moves into his sights, and he squeezes the triggering mechanism, and ten thousand tiny pellets fly up his own ass.

Despite the best precautions and the best intentions, sometimes shit just happens.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

C
OLONEL
J
OHNSON RETURNED
,
AND IN HIS BEEFY FISTS WERE THREE THICK
files. General Tingle suggested we adjourn to the long conference table in the corner of his office. A general’s wish is your command, and we got up and rearranged ourselves.

Tingle read each file first, then me, and I handed them to Jennie, who slid them down the table to Colonel Johnson. Having perused many CID files, Tingle and I raced through, whereas Jennie kept thumbing around, searching for the relevant pages and passages.

We were nearly halfway through when another gent wandered into the office. He wore a gray suit and was about twenty years younger than the other agents, nor did he look really sneaky, just slightly shifty. He walked directly to the far corner of the room, and Colonel Johnson left the table and the two of them engaged in a quick whispered conversation.

As I read, I learned that the M72 Light Antitank Weapon comes stored in boxes of two, and the Bouncing Betty mine—the proper nomenclature being the M16A2 mine—comes stored in boxes of four. Thus it seemed a fair assumption that Jason and his pals had at least one more LAW, at least three more Bouncing Bettys, and, hopefully, no suitcase nukes or canisters of anthrax some idiot packed in the wrong box. But it happens.

One theft occurred from an arms storage bunker located at Fort Hood, Texas. The bunker was inventoried on November 16—everything on hand and shipshape—and was then reinventoried on December 16, a perfunctory monthly check done by a lieutenant detailed from a local infantry battalion. During the second inventory, the lieutenant noted that three containers of 81mm mortar rounds, two containers of LAWs, and three boxes of M16A2 mines that were present for duty at the first inventory were now AWOL, and he dutifully filed an appropriate Oh-Shit report.

The second open case was a bit more interesting, and from our perspective, more hair-raising. At 2:00
A.M
. on the night of December 22, a flatbed truck pulled up to the Port of Galveston Pier 37 Roll-on, Roll-off Terminal. The driver dutifully showed the night guard a set of authorization documents and was allowed entry to the facility. Three bulk containers were loaded on board the truck’s flatbed, and the vehicle and crew drove off into the steamy night. One container held forty boxes of LAWs, another held sixty containers of M16A2 mines, and the third held forty M16 automatic rifles. A routine check the next morning revealed that nobody in existence had dispatched the truck, and with the impressive clarity of hindsight it was swiftly concluded that the authorization documents were forgeries, and expert ones.

I truly hoped this wasn’t the one. Jason and his pals could have enough stuff to turn D.C. into Baghdad.

On the other hand, the earmarks were there—superior organization, boldness, and cleverness. Not good.

The last theft was more ambiguous, more haphazard, and for its sheer brazenness, in a way the most ingenious. On February 9, also at Fort Hood, three different units engaged in marksmanship training on three different firing ranges reported the disappearance of munitions. An infantry unit at a LAW range reported two boxes of M72 LAWs mysteriously missing. Twenty minutes later, an engineer unit training at an explosives range reported that one box of M16A2 mines, a twenty-pound container of C4 plastic explosive, and two boxes of blasting caps were on the lam. And within minutes, a different infantry unit at a third range reported that twenty M203 grenades, as well as an M203 grenade launcher, were missing.

The reports rolled into the headquarters, the post commander went nuts, and a post-wide lockdown was immediately initiated. Within three hours, two range control inspectors were found, hog-tied with tent cord, in a small ravine beside a tank trail. Their unhappy story was that they had stopped on the trail to help a uniformed soldier who flagged them down, who then approached their humvee, suddenly whipped out a handheld Taser, and efficiently dispatched them both to la-la land. Their humvee and their range control armbands were stolen. The humvee turned up the next morning ditched beside another tank trail.

This theft was unsettling and curious, but of the three cases the one from Galveston had the ugliest possibilities. If Jason had that much stuff, an all-out assault on the White House was a possibility. Looking first at me, then at Jennie, General Tingle asked, “Well...any conclusions?”

I was sure the question was rhetorical. We didn’t have a clue.

Tingle turned and requested the most recent arrival to join us. Back to us, he explained, “Chief Warrant Eric Tanner, our resident expert in munitions and weapons security. One of our top investigators.”

We all shook hands. Without any ado, Eric Tanner made a sweeping announcement, suggesting, “If international terrorists are behind these murders, you’re wasting your time with all three of these cases.”

Jennie glanced at me, and then informed him, “Our lead suspect is a Secret Service agent named Barnes.
If
there’s a connection to foreign terrorists, it’s only financial.”

“Okay.” He considered that a moment, then asked, “Accomplices?”

“Three we know of—possibly more. Barnes appears to be the mastermind. At least one woman is involved.”

Eric raised an eyebrow but did not comment on that news.

I asked, “Why are you so sure these thefts didn’t involve foreign terrorists?”

“Start with the first case at Fort Hood, the bunker theft. Here’s what happened. The munitions bunker has a double lock system. It’s electronically monitored whenever it’s opened.” He looked at me and said, “You get it, right?”

“The thefts occurred during an authorized entry.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Tingle nod and Tanner continued, “The bunker was opened
only
once between the two monthly inventories, by a quartermaster team—a sergeant and three privates—delivering fifty containers of 5.56 ammo. It might interest you to know that this is our most common form of munitions thefts.”

“I thought the case remained open.”

“It is.” Tingle again nodded, and Tanner explained, “We interrogated the four soldiers. Nobody confessed, though obviously at least one of them’s lying. Nearly always in cases like this, it was a crime of opportunity. So now the thief has to locate a buyer, and we’re watching all four of them.”

I thought about that a moment. “Isn’t that...a little passive?”

He gave me a sneaky smile. “Each of the four will soon be approached by a fat-cat arms merchant from the Middle East—one of our guys. He’s already in Killeen, the town outside the base, casing his targets.”