Читать книгу Homeland Terror - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

McLean, Virginia

Three hundred yards from the lean-to rooftop where Edgar Byrnes lay peering through the night-vision scope of his M-136 AT-4 rocket launcher, Roberta Williamson was finishing another routine workday on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. Yes, she’d put in overtime, but that was the norm for her these days. She’d only been at the Langley facility ten months, and she still felt the need to do extra work to prove herself worthy of the promotion she’d received after five years of field work with the Agency’s Paris bureau. She was now an intercept analyst for the Company’s counterterrorism division, part of a thirteen-person team charged with ferreting out communication links between al Qaeda sleeper cells in the States and their overseas contacts. It was demanding work, but Williamson loved the challenge.

For Williamson, the biggest downside to her job was its sedentary nature. She’d put on twelve pounds since reporting to Langley, and long hours at the desk had given her lower-back problems, as well. She knew more exercise would help on both fronts and she tried, whenever possible, to leave time at the end of the day to do some stretches and then jog around some portion of the facility’s 130-acre grounds. This night it was snowing outside, so Williamson figured she had an easy excuse to skip the workout. When her phone rang, however, she suspected her boss had other ideas. She smiled ruefully as she picked up the receiver. “Williamson here.”

“Hey, Robbi. It’s your conscience.”

“I figured as much,” Williamson replied.

“So, whaddya say? Up for a jog?”

She chuckled, “Do I have a choice?”

“Be right there.”

“Bastard,” Williamson teased before hanging up the phone. She was still smiling as she pushed away from her desk and kicked off her pumps.

Her “conscience” was former Army Colonel Felix Garber, the fifty-seven-year-old California native who’d recommended her for the job with counterterrorism and had served as her mentor these past ten months. Before joining the Company, Garber had put in twenty years with the XVIII Airborne Corps, concluding his service as the officer in charge of demolition operations in Khamisiyah following the Gulf War. He was now deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism division, and Williamson suspected it was only a matter of time before he took over the top position. She and Garber had worked alongside each other several times when the colonel had come to Paris on assignment, and they’d struck up a friendship based on their mutual passion for country music, haute cuisine and the Los Angeles Lakers. Working in adjacent offices now, they’d drawn even closer the past few months, and another incentive Williamson had for losing weight was her anticipation of the day when their relationship led to the bedroom and Garber would have his first look at her without her clothes on.

She had changed into her jogging sweats and was tying her running shoes when Garber appeared in her doorway, wearing rubberized biker shorts and a sleeveless ski vest. He was in good shape and had a better physique than most men half his age.

“You want to go running dressed like that?” Williamson said. “You’ll freeze!”

“Wimp,” Garber said with a grin. “It’s not cold out—it’s brisk.”

“Yeah, right.” She laughed.

As they left the office and headed down the hall, Garber floated the idea of having dinner together after their run. He mentioned a new sports bar that had just opened up across the river in D.C. They’d have the Lakers game on, he told her, and their crab cakes had just gotten a good write-up in the Post.

“Can’t say no to a good crab cake,” Williamson said.

They were waiting for the elevator when Garber snapped his fingers.

“Damn!” he groaned. “I forgot to update Tangiers on that cable intercept we just cracked.”

“Go ahead and fax them,” Williamson told him. “I’ll hold the elevator and get in a few stretches.”

“Be right back,” Garber said.

Williamson watched Garber head back down the hallway, admiring his legs. And that ass, she thought to herself, smiling.

The colonel had unlocked his office door and was heading into his office when a sudden explosion shook the building. The floor beneath Williamson’s feet shuddered with so much force she lost her balance and bounced off the elevator doors, then fell as if struck by an invisible force. By the time she’d landed, the floor had stabilized, but a deafening alarm had gone off in the hallway and the ceiling-mounted safety sprinklers had been activated. Water showered down on Williamson as she slowly sat up, mind racing, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Like Garber, Williamson was a California native and her first thought was that there’d been an earthquake. But then she smelled smoke and heard the unmistakable crackling sound of racing flames. Alarmed, she glanced down the hallway leading back to her office.

“No!” she gasped.

The inner walls of her office, as well as Garber’s and the office next to hers, had all but disintegrated, and a portion of the ceiling had collapsed into the flames engulfing the corridor. A woman’s body hung eerily out over the edge of the overhead cavity, then tumbled down to the hallway floor, joining three other corpses strewed about like discarded dolls. The fire had begun to devour the victims, and Williamson’s stomach clenched at her first whiff of burning flesh.

“Felix!” she called out, staggering to her feet.

She cried out Garber’s name again as she tore off her sweatshirt and soaked it beneath the ceiling sprinklers. Pressing the makeshift mask to her face, she headed down the hall. Smoke stung her eyes as she leaned over the first body she came to—Roger Olsen, a colleague she’d shared coffee with in the cafeteria just a few hours ago. The man’s clothes were torn, and he was bleeding from deep cuts sustained when he’d crashed through the office wall that now lay smoldering in broken chunks on the floor around him. His jaw had been dislocated and his mouth hung open, slack and off-center. His eyes were open but there was no life in them.

“No,” Williamson repeated, her voice reduced to a hoarse whisper.

The next two bodies she passed were in even worse condition, but neither they nor Olsen’s corpse adequately prepared her for the horror that awaited her when she came upon the remains of her mentor.

Felix Garber’s office had taken the brunt of the 84 mm warhead fired from Edgar Byrnes’s AT-4 rocket launcher. When he’d returned to his office to send his fax, Garber had walked directly into the spalling effect achieved after the rocket had penetrated the outer wall of the building. Garber had been killed instantly and then cast back out into the hallway by an incendiary barrage of projectile fragments that had left his body charred and mutilated. His right arm was missing along with half his left leg, and his torso had been rent open and seared beyond recognition. His nearly severed head hung twisted from his shoulders in such a way that even though he lay on his back his face was turned to the floor.

Williamson’s legs weakened and she dropped to her knees, unable to take her eyes off the grisly remains. She lowered the dampened sweatshirt and opened her mouth as if to scream, but all that came forth was a strained mewling. She became oblivious to the rank stench of burning flesh and the ominous approach of flames consuming those areas in the hall where the safety sprinklers had been rendered inoperable.

Someone appeared at the far end of the hallway and called out to Williamson, but she remained transfixed, overwhelmed by the horror around her. Two co-workers—men who’d rushed up to the sixth floor after feeling the explosion—scrambled down the corridor and pulled Williamson to her feet. She numbly allowed them to lead her beyond range of the flames. It was only when they’d reached the elevators that she found her voice. When she spoke, however, it seemed to her as her words were coming from somewhere far away, being mouthed by someone else.

“Who?” she moaned. “Who did this?”

“EASY, BOY,” Edgar Byrnes called out as he slipped on his backpack and opened the corral gate at Conlon Farm. “Easy, Jefferson.”

The roan horse had been spooked by the rocket launcher and neighed loudly as it clomped in circles around the corral. Other animals were making a racket inside the lean-to, and several chickens had squawked their way outside and were scurrying in all directions. Byrnes strode toward Jefferson, holding his arms out before him. In one hand he held a salt lick, in the other a carrot.

“Come on, Jefferson,” he pleaded. “We don’t have time for this.”

The horse charged blindly past. Byrnes turned and jogged counterclockwise in hopes he could intercept Jefferson during the horse’s next lap around the corral. He continued to call out, trying to calm the beast. Finally Jefferson slowed to a trot and then came to a stop in front of Byrnes, choosing the carrot.

“Good boy.”

As he waited for Jefferson to consume the snack, Byrnes glanced through the woods. It had stopped snowing, and he could clearly see flames spewing from the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. A trio of helicopters hovered above the carnage, searchlights raking the surrounding grounds. Byrnes knew it would only be a matter of time before the search widened to include the farm.

“Okay, boy,” Byrnes said once Jefferson had finished the carrot. “It’s time.”

Byrnes had already saddled the horse and strapped on the reins. He slid one foot into the nearest stirrup and hoisted himself up onto Jefferson’s back, then slapped the beast’s flank with the flat of his palm.

“Let’s go!”

Jefferson bolted from the corral and carried Byrnes deep into the woods leading away from the CIA facilities. Byrnes had ridden this stretch countless times over the past few weeks, including the previous night, when he’d gone to pick up the weapon from his AFM contacts. The route was ingrained in Jefferson’s mind and the horse retraced it at full gallop, threading between trees with relative ease. The woods were dark, but the horse forged on unerringly.

Once they reached the cloverleaf ramp leading under the George Washington Expressway to Turkey Run Park, Byrnes slowed Jefferson to a trot. There were a few other riders out, as well. The militiaman composed himself, then joined them, expressing puzzlement.

“I heard some kind of crash,” he told the others.

“Something going down at Langley,” one of the other riders explained, pointing out the helicopters in the distance.

“Sounded like a bomb,” another rider said with a trace of anxiety. “I hope it’s not terrorists.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Byrnes reassured the other man. “That place is like a fortress. No way is anybody going to be able to attack it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Me, too,” Byrnes said. “Hell, if somebody can attack CIA in their own backyard, nobody’s safe.”