The Black Widow Page 35

  Two undercover SWAT agents were chatting amiably just outside the hotel’s entrance. Two more waited near the taxi stand. In addition, there were SWAT agents inside the hotel, two in the chrome-and-laminate lobby lounge, and two at the concierge stand. Each SWAT agent carried a concealed Springfield .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol with an eight-round magazine and an additional round in the chamber. One of the agents at the concierge stand, a veteran of the Iraq surge, was the designated shooter. He planned to approach the target, subject number two, from behind. If ordered by the president—and if no innocent lives would be lost—he would employ lethal force.

  All eight members of the SWAT team tensed as the elevator doors opened and the two women, subjects one and two, stepped out. A new camera followed them across the foyer to the edge of the lobby. There the blond woman stopped abruptly and placed a restraining hand on the arm of the dark-haired woman. Words were exchanged, inaudible inside the NCTC, and the blond woman pondered her mobile phone. Then something happened that no one was expecting—not the FBI teams inside and outside the hotel, not the president and his closest aides in the Situation Room, and surely not the four spymasters watching from the Operations Floor at the NCTC. Without warning, the two women turned away from the lobby and set out along a ground-floor corridor, toward the back of the hotel.

  “They’re going the wrong way,” said Carter.

  “No, they’re not,” replied Gabriel. “They’re going the way Saladin told them to go.”

  Carter was silent.

  “Tell the SWAT teams to follow them. Tell them to take the shot.”

  “They can’t,” snapped Carter. “Not inside the hotel.”

  “Take it now, Adrian, because we’re not going to get another chance.”

  Just then, the Operations Floor flashed with an intense burst of white light. An instant later there came a sound like a sonic boom that shook the building violently. Carter and Paul Rousseau were momentarily confused; Gabriel and Fareed Barakat, men of the Middle East, were not. Gabriel rushed to the window as a mushroom cloud of fire rose over the facility’s main security checkpoint. A few seconds later he saw a large cargo truck careening at high speed into the forecourt separating the NCTC from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

  Gabriel whirled around and shouted like a madman at those closest to the windows to move to safety. He glanced briefly at the giant video screen and saw the two women, subjects one and two, entering the parking garage of the Key Bridge Marriott. Then there was a second explosion, and the video screen, like everything else, turned to black.

  In the Situation Room of the White House, the screens went black, too. So did the videoconference link with the director of the NCTC.

  “What just happened?” asked the president.

  It was the secretary of homeland security who answered.

  “Obviously, there’s some sort of problem with the feed.”

  “I can’t order the SWAT teams to move unless I can see what’s going on.”

  “We’re checking, Mr. President.”

  So was every other principal, deputy, and aide in the room. It was the director of the CIA, thirty seconds later, who informed the president that two loud sounds, possibly explosions, had been heard in the McLean–Tysons Corner area, near the intersection of Route 123 and the Beltway.

  “Heard by whom?” asked the president.

  “They could hear the explosions at CIA Headquarters, sir.”

  “A mile away?”

  “More like two, sir.”

  The president stared at the blank video screen. “What just happened?” he asked again, but this time there was no answer in the room, only the concussive thump of another explosion, close enough to rattle the White House. “What the hell was that?”

  “Checking, sir.”

  “Check faster.”

  Fifteen seconds later the president had his answer. It came not from the senior officials gathered inside the Situation Room but from the Secret Service agents stationed atop the Executive Mansion. Smoke was pouring from the Lincoln Memorial.

  America was under attack.

  61

  THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL

  HE HAD ARRIVED ON FOOT, a single man, dark hair, about five eight, wearing a bulky woolen coat against the evening chill and carrying a backpack over one shoulder. Later, the FBI would determine that a Honda Pilot SUV, Virginia plates, had dropped him at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Constitution Avenue. The Honda Pilot had continued north on Twenty-third Street to Virginia Avenue, where it made a left turn. The man with the heavy woolen coat and backpack had headed south, across the far western end of the Washington Mall, to the Lincoln Memorial. Several U.S. Park Police officers stood watch at the base of the steps. They did not challenge or even seem to notice the man with the backpack and the oversize coat.

  The monument, built in the form of a Greek Doric temple, was aglow with a warm golden light that seemed to radiate from within. The man with the backpack paused for several seconds on the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, then proceeded up the final steps, into the memorial’s central chamber. About twenty tourists were gathered before the nineteen-foot statue of a seated Lincoln. Equal numbers were in the two side chambers, before the towering engravings of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. The man with the oversize coat placed his backpack near the base of one of the ionic columns and, drawing a mobile phone from his pocket, began taking photographs of the statue. Curiously, his lips were moving.

  In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful . . .

  A young couple, in broken English, asked the man whether he would take their photograph in front of the statue. He declined and, turning abruptly, hurried down the steps toward the Reflecting Pool. Too late, a female Park Police officer, twenty-eight years old, a mother of two, noticed the unattended bag and ordered the tourists to evacuate the memorial. An instant later the policewoman was decapitated by the circular saw of ball bearings that flew from the bag at detonation, as were the man and woman who had asked to have their photo taken. The bomber was blown from his feet by the force of the explosion. A tourist from Oklahoma, sixty-nine years old, a Vietnam veteran, unwittingly helped the murderer to his feet, and for this benevolent act was shot through the heart with the Glock 19 pistol that the man pulled from beneath his coat. The man managed to kill six more people before being shot by the Park Police officers at the base of the steps. In all, twenty-eight would die.

  By the time the bomb exploded, the Honda Pilot was braking to a stop outside the main entrance of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One man climbed out and entered the Hall of States. His coat was identical to the one worn by the man who attacked the Lincoln Memorial, though he carried no backpack; his bomb was strapped to his body. He made his way past the visitor center to the main box office, where he detonated his device. Three more men then emerged from the Honda, including the driver. All were armed with AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifles. They slaughtered the wounded and the dying in the Hall of States and then moved methodically from the Eisenhower Theater to the Opera House to the Concert Hall, killing indiscriminately. In all, more than three hundred would die.

  By the time the first units of the Metropolitan Police had arrived, the three surviving terrorists had crossed the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway on foot and were entering Washington Harbor. There they moved from restaurant to restaurant, killing without mercy. Fiola Mare, Nick’s Riverside Grill, Sequoia: all were raked with gunfire. Once again, they encountered no resistance from the Metropolitan Police; the Americans, it seemed, had been caught flat-footed. Or perhaps, thought the leader of the attack cell, Saladin had deceived them. The three men reloaded their weapons and headed into the heart of Georgetown in search of other prey.

  It was into this chaos that the two women—one dark-haired, the other blond: subjects one and two, as they were known—entered the rear parking garage o
f the Key Bridge Marriott. A second car, a rented Toyota Corolla, was waiting. Much later, it would be established that the car had been left in the garage earlier that day by the same man who had delivered the suicide vests at Tysons Corner Center.

  Usually, it was subject one, the Israeli agent, who handled the driving, but this time subject two, the Frenchwoman, slid behind the wheel. Leaving the garage, she careened past the little blockhouse of the parking attendant, smashing the barrier gate in the process, and headed for the hotel’s Lee Highway exit. The undercover SWAT teams stationed in the surface parking lot did not deploy lethal force against subject one, the Frenchwoman, because they had received no authorization from the president or the director of the FBI. Even the FBI surveillance teams were momentarily paralyzed because they were receiving no guidance from the NCTC. A moment earlier the watchers had heard something over their radios that sounded like an explosion. Now, from the NCTC, there was only silence.

  The Lee Highway exit of the hotel was a right turn only. The Frenchwoman turned left instead. She evaded the oncoming cars, turned left onto North Lynn Street, and a few seconds later was racing across Key Bridge toward Georgetown. The FBI undercover SWAT and surveillance teams had no choice but to repeat the Frenchwoman’s reckless moves. Two vehicles spilled from the Lee Highway exit, two more into North Fort Myer Drive. By the time they reached Key Bridge, the Corolla was already turning onto M Street. It had no tracking beacon and no interior microphones. From the heights of the bridge, the FBI teams could see flashing red-and-blue lights streaking toward Georgetown.

  62

  LIBERTY CROSSING, VIRGINIA

  GABRIEL OPENED ONE EYE, then, slowly, painfully, the other. He had lost consciousness, for how long he did not know—a few seconds, a few minutes, an hour or more. Nor could he fathom the attitude of his own body. He was submerged in a sea of debris, that much he knew, but he could not discern whether he was prone or supine, upright or topsy-turvy. He felt no undue pressure in his head, which he took as a good sign, though he was afraid he had lost the ability to hear. The last sound he could recall was the roar of the detonation and the whoosh-thump of the vacuum effect. The supersonic blast wave seemed to have scrambled his internal organs. He hurt everywhere—his lungs, his heart, his liver, everywhere.

  He pushed with his hands, and the debris yielded. Through a fog of dust he glimpsed the exposed steel skeleton of the building and the severed arteries of network cables and electric wiring. Sparks rained down, as if from a Roman candle, and through a rip in the ceiling he could make out the handle of the Big Dipper. A cold November wind chilled him. A finch landed within his grasp, studied him dispassionately, and was gone again.

  Gabriel swept aside more of the debris and, wincing, sat up. One of the kidney-shaped tables had come to rest across his legs. Lying next to him, motionless, dredged in dust, was a woman. Her face was pristine, save for a few small cuts from the flying glass. Her eyes were open and fixed in the thousand-yard stare of death. Gabriel recognized her; she was an analyst who worked at a pod near his. Jill was her name—or was it Jen? Her job was to scour the manifests of incoming flights for potential bad actors. She was a bright young woman, barely out of college, probably from a wholesome town somewhere in Iowa or Utah. She had come to Washington to help keep her country safe, thought Gabriel, and now she was dead.

  He placed his hand lightly on her face and closed her eyes. Then he pushed away the table and rose unsteadily to his feet. Instantly, the shattered world of the Operations Floor began to spin. Gabriel placed his hands on his knees until the merry-go-round stopped. The right side of his head was warm and wet. Blood flowed into his eyes.

  He wiped it away and returned to the window where he had seen the approaching truck. There were no bodies and very little debris on this side of the building; everything had been blown inward. Nor were there any windows or outer walls. The entire southern facade of the National Counterterrorism Center had been shorn away. Gabriel moved cautiously toward the edge of the precipice and looked down. In the forecourt was a deep crater, far deeper than the one that had been left outside the Weinberg Center in Paris, a meteor strike. The skyway connecting the NCTC to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was gone. So was the entire northern face of the building. Inside its shattered conference rooms and offices not a single light burned. A survivor waved to Gabriel from the cliff’s edge of an upper floor. Gabriel, not knowing what else to do, waved back.

  The traffic on the Beltway had ground to a halt, white headlights on the inner loop, red taillights on the outer. Gabriel patted the front of his jacket and discovered he was still in possession of his mobile phone. He removed it and thumbed it into life. He still had service. He dialed Mikhail’s number and raised the phone to his ear, but there was only silence. Or maybe Mikhail was speaking and Gabriel couldn’t hear. He realized he had heard nothing since regaining consciousness—not a siren, not a groan of pain or cry for help, not his footfalls through the rubble. He was in a silent world. He wondered if the condition were permanent and thought about all the sounds he would never hear again. He would never hear the nonsensical chatter of his children or thrill to the arias of La Bohème. Nor would he hear the soft bristly tap of a Winsor & Newton Series 7 paintbrush against a Caravaggio. But it was the sound of Chiara singing he would miss the most. Gabriel always joked that he had fallen in love with Chiara the first time she made him fettuccini and mushrooms, but it wasn’t true. He lost his heart to her the first time he heard her singing a silly Italian love song when she thought no one was listening.

  Gabriel killed the connection to Mikhail and picked his way through the debris of what a moment ago had been the Operations Floor. He had to give Saladin credit; it was a masterstroke. Honor was due. The dead were everywhere. The astonished survivors, the lucky ones, were hauling themselves laboriously from the rubble. Gabriel located the spot where he had been standing when he heard the first explosion. Paul Rousseau was bleeding heavily from numerous lacerations and cradling an obviously broken arm. Fareed Barakat, the ultimate survivor, seemed to have come through it unscathed. Looking only mildly annoyed, he was brushing the dust from his handmade English suit. Adrian Carter was still holding a phone to his ear. He didn’t seem to realize the receiver was no longer connected to its base.

  Gabriel gently removed the phone from Carter’s grasp and asked whether Safia Bourihane was dead. He could not hear the sound of his own voice, nor could he hear Carter’s response. It was as if someone had pressed the mute button. He looked toward the giant video screen, but the screen was gone. And then he realized that Natalie was gone, too.

  63

  GEORGETOWN

  SAFIA CLEARLY KNEW WHERE SHE was going. After making the right turn onto M Street, she blew through the red light at the base of Thirty-fourth and then swerved hard into Bank Street, a cobbled alley that climbed the gentle hill up to Prospect. Ignoring the stop sign, she made a right, and then another left onto Thirty-third. It was a one-way street running south-to-north up the length of Georgetown’s West Village, with four-way stops at every block. Safia flashed across N Street without slowing. She was holding the steering wheel tightly with her left hand. Her right, the one with the detonator, was clutching the grip of the shift.

  “Are they still behind us?”

  “Who?”

  “The Americans!” Safia shouted.

  “What Americans?”

  “The ones who’ve been watching us at the hotel. The ones who followed us to the shopping mall.”

  “No one followed us.”

  “Of course they did! And they were waiting for us just now in the parking lot of the hotel. But he tricked them.”

  “Who tricked them?”

  “Saladin, of course. Can’t you hear the sirens? The attack has begun.”

  Natalie could hear them. There were sirens everywhere.

  “Alhamdulillah,” she said softly.

  Ahead, an elderly man entered the crosswalk at O Street, tr
ailed by a basset hound on a leash. Safia slammed on the horn with her detonator hand, and both man and canine moved out of the car’s path. Natalie glanced over her shoulder. The man and the dog appeared uninjured. Far behind them, a car rounded the corner at Prospect Street at high speed.

  “Where did we attack them?” asked Natalie.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s my target?”

  “In a minute.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Alarm flashed on Safia’s face. “They’re coming!”

  “Who?”

  “The Americans.”

  Safia put her foot to the floor and raced across P Street. Then, at Volta Place, she made another right turn.

  “There’s a French restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue called Bistrot Lepic. It’s about a kilometer up the street, on the left side. Some diplomats from the French Embassy are having a private dinner there tonight with people from the Foreign Ministry from Paris. It will be very crowded. Walk as far into the restaurant as you can and hit your detonator. If they try to stop you at the door, do it there.”

  “Is it just me, or are there others?”

  “Just you. We’re part of the second wave of attacks.”

  “What’s your target?”

  “I told you once already, it doesn’t matter.”

  Safia braked hard at Wisconsin Avenue.

  “Get out.”

  “But—”

  “Get out!” Safia waved her clenched right fist in Natalie’s face, the fist that held the detonator. “Get out or I’ll kill us both right now!”

  Natalie climbed out and watched the Toyota speed south on Wisconsin Avenue. Then she looked up the length of Volta Place. No traffic moved in the street. It seemed Safia had managed to elude their pursuers. Once again, Natalie was alone.