A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [41]
“Let’s hope you’re worth it, pal,” one of the other men said finally. “Let’s hope you’re worth it.”
The group was led down a hallway to a nondescript door just outside the House Chamber.
“The president is waiting for you inside,” an agent said.
Griff inhaled deeply, then exhaled and opened the door. From his seat at the desk inside the small office, James Allaire rose. For a time, the two men stood several feet apart, sizing each other up.
“You’re lying to these people.”
“I’m the goddamn president of this country. I do what I feel is necessary to maintain order and protect the citizens. I’m counting on you to save their lives.”
“You were wrong about me. You know that? I’m not a terrorist.”
“Well then, prove it.”
CHAPTER 17
DAY 2
8:00 A.M. (EST)
The exterior of the S&S Trading Co. mirrored the other garages and rundown brick warehouses lining a quarter-mile stretch of K Street in southeast D.C. Reports of decreased violence in the notoriously high-crime neighborhood amounted to little more than the city’s well-connected Economic Council responding to a steady inflow of landlord payoffs. Homicides were up, prostitution was up, and tax revenues were down. Agitation was increasing to clean up the area in preparation for gentrification, and sooner or later there would be a big-time crackdown.
But not that night.
With every cop in D.C. summoned to the Capitol, patrols were essentially nonexistent, and the street people were out in force. Teenage drug dealers and over-the-hill hookers strolled past the S&S Trading Co. without giving the building a second thought. From the street, they could not see the sophisticated array of satellite dishes set dead center on the roof. Beyond the massive steel sliding door, painted a nondescript reddish brown, two men sat at opposite sides of a folding table, smoking cigars, drinking coffee, and playing cards. The men, one African American, the other Caucasian, were dressed in military fatigues.
A naked bulb dangled from a cord suspended a few feet above them. Smoke drifted through the shaft of light. Seated to one side of the dimly lit space was a third man, copper-skinned and wiry, with a once-handsome face that was marred by a spectacular scar running from his forehead through his brow and down his right cheek. He was paying no attention to the others. Instead, wearing headphones, he was fixed on a wall-mounted bank of a dozen video monitors.
The images on each of the screens automatically changed every three minutes, along with the sound associated with it. A joystick enabled the man to adjust the angle and distance of the views projected by the concealed cameras, positioned throughout the United States Capitol building. There were several of them he could zoom in close enough to read the number plates on the seats in the House Chamber, and he could rotate another pair 360 degrees to observe the chaos unfolding in Statuary Hall.
There was room for a second operator at the bank of screens, but at the moment one man was handling them by himself.
Suddenly a speaker, mounted on the wall just above the monitor bank, crackled to life, disrupting the quiet, and actually startling the man, whose name was Alex Ramirez. Ramirez, an electronics expert who had soldiered in a dozen or more wars around the globe, glanced up at the cameras he had installed—cameras that were now monitoring him and the others in the S&S Trading Company.
“I don’t pay you goof-offs to play cards,” a disembodied male voice boomed out. “Get back in the garage and work on the equipment. Ramirez, where’s Fink?”
The other men stopped playing cards and redirected their attention toward the monitors on which they were featured.
“Fink’s catching some Z’s in the back room,” Ramirez said.
“Well, wake him up,” the voice barked.
Ramirez swiveled his chair around.
“Hey, goof-offs, on your way back to the garage, can one of you guys go and wake up Fink. Tell him it’s Cain.”
Ramirez had recognized Cain’s voice.
“If you men follow orders,” he had said that first day, “you’ll be rewarded to the degree that Matt