Executive orders - Tom Clancy [12]
I was just on the phone with Andrews. They have tapes of the RADAR and stuff. I have agents from the Washington Field Office heading there to interview the tower people. National Transportation Safety Board will have people there, too, to assist. Initial word, looks like a Japan Airlines 747 kamikaze'd in. The Andrews people say the pilot declared an emergency as an unscheduled KLM flight and drove straight over their runways, hung a little left, and well O'Day shrugged. WFO has people on the Hill now to commence the investigation. I'm assuming this one goes on the books as a terrorist incident, and that gives us jurisdiction.
Where's the ADIC? Murray asked, meaning the Assistant Director in Charge of the Bureau's Washington office, quartered at Buzzard's Point on the Potomac River.
St. Lucia with Angie, taking a vacation. Tough luck for Tony. The inspector grunted. Tony Caruso had gotten away only three days earlier. Tough day for a lot of people. The body count's going to be huge, Dan, lots worse'n Oklahoma. I've sent out a general alert for forensics experts. Mess like this, we'll have to identify a lot of bodies from DNA. Oh, the TV guys are asking how it's possible for the Air Force to let this happen. A shake of the head accompanied the conclusion. O'Day needed somebody to dump on, and the TV commentators were the most attractive target of opportunity. There would be others in due course; both hoped the FBI would not be one of them.
Anything else we know?
Pat shook his head. Nope. It's going to take time, Dan.
Ryan?
Was on the Hill, should be on his way to the White House. They caught him on TV. He looks kinda rocky. Our brothers and sisters at USSS are having a really bad night, too. The guy I talked to ten minutes ago almost lost it. We might end up having a jurisdictional conflict over who runs the investigation.
Great. Murray snorted. We'll let the AG sort that one- But there wasn't an Attorney General, and there wasn't a Secretary of the Treasury for him to call.
Inspector O'Day didn't have to run through it. A federal statute empowered the United States Secret Service as lead agency to investigate any attack on the President. But another federal statute gave FBI jurisdiction over terrorism. A local statute for murder also brought the Washington Metropolitan Police in, of course. Toss in the National Transportation Safety Board-until proven otherwise, it could merely be a horrible aircraft accident-and that was just the beginning. Every agency had authority and expertise. The Secret Service, smaller than the FBI, and with fewer resources, did have some superb investigators, and some of the finest technical experts around. NTSB knew more about airplane crashes than anyone in the world. But the Bureau had to be the lead agency for this investigation, didn't it? Murray thought. Except that Director Shaw was dead, and without him to swing the clout club
Jesus, Murray thought. He and Bill went back to the Academy together. They'd worked in the same squad as rookie street agents in riverside Philadelphia, chasing bank robbers
Pat read his face and nodded. Yeah, Dan, takes time to catch up, doesn't it? We've been gutted like a fish, man. He handed over a sheet from a legal pad with a handwritten list of known dead.
A nuclear strike wouldn't have hurt us this badly, Murray realized as he scanned the names. A developing crisis would have given ample strategic warning, and slowly, quietly, senior people would have left Washington for various places of safety, many of them would have survived-or so the planners went-and after the strike there would have been some sort of functioning government to pick up the pieces. But not now.
RYAN HAD COME to the White House a thousand times, to visit, to deliver briefings, for meetings important and otherwise, and most recently to work in his own office as National Security Advisor. This was the first time he hadn't had to show ID and walk through the metal detectors-more properly, he did walk straight through one from force of habit, but this time, when the buzzer