Threat Vector Read online

  Some thirty yards behind him, a second man walked the same path, but his pace was faster and he closed on the man ahead of him. He too wore a dark raincoat with the hood down.

  And twenty yards behind the second pedestrian, a third man jogged up the path, rapidly gaining on the two ahead of him. He wore dark running clothes.

  All three men formed together just a few yards in front of the parking lot of the complex, the jogger slowed to match the pace of the other two, and here the three turned as one and stepped onto the property.

  With a continued air of nonchalance the men flipped the hoods of their jackets over their heads. Each man also wore a black fleece gaiter around his neck, and simultaneously they pulled these up with gloved hands until their faces were covered from the bottoms of their eyes down.

  They stepped onto the small parking lot that would have been illuminated if not for the power outage.

  All three reached under their jackets and pulled Belgian-made semiautomatic pistols, FN Five-seveNs. Each weapon carried twenty-one rounds of 5.7x28-millimeter ammunition, a potent handgun caliber.

  Long silencers protruded from the muzzles of their guns.

  A man with the call sign of Crane was in charge of the small unit. He had more men—seven in total served under him—but he felt his ingress would not require his full squad, so he brought along only two of his assets for this phase of the mission.

  And he was correct. ADSC was not a hard target by any stretch of the imagination.

  —

  A single security guard worked on the premises, patrolling the office complex in a golf cart at this time of the early morning. He was cocooned in a zippered plastic weather enclosure to keep the mist off him.

  When the lights had not come on after thirty seconds or so, the guard reached to his belt and pulled off his iPhone. He knew that of the six companies with offices here on the property, only a few guys at ADSC were actually on site early this morning. He decided he’d call them to see if they needed him to come over with a flashlight.

  As the guard scrolled through his contact list, movement in the dark outside his plastic shell caught his eye. He glanced up and to his left.

  —

  Crane fired a single round through the clear plastic enclosure and into the forehead of the security guard at a range of five feet. Blood and brain matter splattered inside the enclosure, and the young man slumped forward. A mobile phone slid out of his fingertips, and it fell between his feet.

  Crane unzipped the plastic, felt around in the pockets of the dead security guard, and retrieved a set of keys.

  The three men then continued around the side of the building. It was dark back here, except for the single orange glow of a cigarette.

  “Hey,” came an uncertain voice from behind the glow.

  Crane raised his Five-seveN and fired three suppressed rounds into the darkness there. From the flashes of the muzzle blast he saw a young man tumbling back through an open doorway that led to a small kitchen.

  Crane’s two hooded assets ran forward and pulled the dead man back outside, and then they closed the door.

  Crane pulled a walkie-talkie from his coat. He clicked the push-to-talk button three times.

  Together the three men waited at the side door for thirty seconds. Then a black Ford Explorer appeared in the parking lot, racing forward with its lights off. It slowed and parked, and five more assets, all dressed the same as those already at the door but also wearing large backpacks, poured out of the Explorer.

  The unit members had designated call signs, each man named after a different type of bird—Crane, Grouse, Quail, Stint, Snipe, Gull, Wigeon, and Duck. Crane was trained to lead, and the others were trained to follow, but each and every man in the team was trained to kill.

  They had memorized the layout of the property from the building’s blueprints, and one of them had with him a schematic for the server farm in the basement, and together they entered through the kitchen door, moving silently in the darkness. They left the kitchen, headed up a hallway, and entered the front lobby. Here they split into two forces. Four men went to the stairwell; four more headed straight back, past the elevators, and toward the main lab.

  —

  Lance Boulder had pulled a flashlight from a toolbox in a closet near the kitchen, and he used this to head up the hall toward the stairwell to check the UPS system, the uninterruptable power supply battery unit that would be keeping his servers running. He hoped like hell that the breaker was, in fact, the culprit. He decided to check to see if power was out at the entire office park, so he took his BlackBerry from his belt and began typing a text message to Randy, the night security guard on the premises.

  When he looked up from the BlackBerry he stopped dead in his tracks. There, just a few feet in front of him, his flashlight shone on a man dressed head to toe in black. Behind him were more men.

  And then he saw the long handgun in the hand of the man in front.

  Only a slight gasp passed his lips before Crane shot him twice in the chest. The silenced rounds barked in the hall. Lance’s body slammed into the wall on his right and he spun to his left, then pitched over facedown.

  His flashlight fell to the floor and illuminated the way ahead for the four killers, and they advanced toward the lab.

  Ken Farmer was taking advantage of the power outage in his building. He had not left his desk or his computer for more than six hours, so now he was just finishing up in the bathroom. The emergency lights did not reach the hallway by the bathroom so, as he opened the door to return to his office, he literally had to feel his way for a few feet.

  He saw the silhouettes of the men ahead, and he immediately knew they were not his colleagues.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He was too shocked to be scared.

  The first man in the group walked up to him quickly, then placed the hot tip of a pistol’s silencer on his forehead.

  Ken raised his hands slowly. “We don’t have any money.”

  The silencer pushed him back, and he walked backward into the dark lab. As soon as he entered he saw black forms move around him, past him, and he heard the shouts of Rajesh and Tim, and then he heard the loud thumps of suppressed gunfire and the tinkling sounds of spent casings bouncing on the tile floor.

  Farmer was led back to his desk, turned around, and placed in his chair by rough gloved hands, and from the light of the monitors in the room he saw Tim and Raj both lying on the floor.

  His mind could not process the fact they had just been shot dead.

  “Whatever you want . . . it’s yours. Just please don’t—”

  Crane moved the silencer of his Five-seveN to Ken Farmer’s right temple and then, at contact distance, he fired a single round. Bone and tissue sprayed the carpet, and the body fell onto the red mess.

  Within seconds Stint called on the radio. In Mandarin he said, “Building secure.”

  Crane did not respond on the walkie-talkie, but instead he took a satellite phone out of his jacket. He pressed a single button, waited a few seconds, and then, speaking Mandarin himself, said, “Power on.”

  Within fifteen seconds the electricity returned to the building. While four of Crane’s assets stood guard at the entrances to ADSC, three more assets went downstairs to the basement.

  Crane sat at Ken’s desk and opened Ken’s personal e-mail. He began a new message, then added everyone on Ken’s contact list to the address line, which ensured more than one thousand different addresses would receive the note. Crane then reached inside his jacket and pulled a small notepad, upon which a letter had been written in English. He transcribed this into the e-mail, his gloved fingertips slowing his typing speed to a crawl.

  Family, Friends, and Colleagues,

  I love you all, but I cannot go on. My life is a failure. Our company has been a lie. I am
destroying everything. I am killing everyone. I have no other options.

  I am sorry.

  Peace, Ken

  Crane did not hit send; instead he spoke into his walkie-talkie. Still in Mandarin, he said, “Ten minutes.” He stood and stepped over Farmer’s body and headed to the basement, where the three others there had already begun the process of attaching a dozen homemade explosives in and around all of the servers. Each device was carefully placed near the hard drives and memory boards of the servers, ensuring that no digital records would remain.

  Wiping the drives clean would have taken hours, and Crane did not have hours, so he had been ordered to take a more kinetic approach to his task.

  In seven minutes they were finished. Crane and Gull returned to the lab, Crane passed his pistol to Gull, and then he leaned back to Farmer’s keyboard and clicked send with the mouse, distributing the disturbing mass e-mail to 1,130 recipients.

  Crane pocketed the notebook with the original letter, and he looked at Ken Farmer’s body. Gull had placed his Five-seveN pistol in the dead man’s right hand.

  A few extra pistol magazines went into Farmer’s pocket, and within a minute the four men were out of the lab. One of the team lit the fuses in the basement, and they headed back out the kitchen door and climbed into the waiting Explorer.

  The four-man security team was already in the vehicle.

  They drove out of the parking lot calmly and slowly, just thirteen minutes after entering the property. Four minutes after they turned off Ravenswood onto the highway, a massive explosion lit the early-morning sky behind them.

  SIXTEEN

  Jack Ryan, Jr., drove his black BMW 335i into D.C. for a morning run around the National Mall. Melanie was with him; she’d spent the night at his place. They were dressed in running clothes and running shoes, and Melanie wore a fanny pack on her hip that contained a water bottle, her keys and wallet, and a few other small odds and ends. They passed a thermos back and forth, sipping the coffee for a little more energy before their run.

  Ryan pulled into the parking lot just north of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, and they finished their coffee while listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition. There was a brief report about a murder-suicide with five victims the previous morning at a software company in Menlo Park, California.

  Neither Jack nor Melanie commented on the piece.

  When the news ended they climbed out of Jack’s Beamer and walked to the Reflecting Pool, where they spent a few minutes stretching, sipping water, and watching the sunrise over the Capitol building and the morning joggers moving in all directions.

  Soon they set off to the west. Though both Melanie and Jack were in excellent condition, Melanie was the all-around better athlete. She’d started playing soccer when her father, an Air Force colonel, had been stationed in Egypt during her teenage years, and she’d taken to the sport, earning herself a full-ride scholarship to American University, where she played as a tough and dependable defender and even led her team as captain her senior year.

  She’d kept her fitness up in grad school and in the two years since college with running and many angry hours spent in the gym.

  Jack had gotten used to three- or four-mile jogs a few mornings a week, and this helped him keep pace with Melanie for much of the run, but he found himself sucking wind after the end of the fourth mile. As they passed the Smithsonian he fought the urge to ask her to slow down; his ego would not allow him to admit he was struggling.

  He noticed her looking over at him several times just past the fifth mile, and he knew his face would be showing the strain he felt in every part of his body, but he did not acknowledge her.

  She spoke in a relaxed tone. “Should we stop?”

  “Why?” he asked, his voice clipped between hard gulps of air.

  “Jack, if you need me to slow down a bit, all you have to do is say—”

  “I’m fine. Race to the finish?” he asked, picking up the pace slightly and getting in front of her.

  Melanie laughed. “No, thanks,” she said. “This pace is comfortable for me.”

  Jack slowed back down a little, silently thanking God she did not call his bluff. He felt her eyes on him for another fifty yards or so, and he imagined she could see right through him. She was doing him a favor by not pushing him any further this morning, and he appreciated her for that.

  All in all, they covered just over six miles. They finished at the Reflecting Pool, where they started, and as soon as they stopped, Jack doubled over, his hands on his knees.

  “You okay?” she said as she put her hand on his back.

  “Ye-yeah.” He struggled to recover. “I might have a little cold coming on.”

  She patted his back and pulled her water bottle from her fanny pack and offered it to him. “Have a sip. Let’s go home. We can stop and get oranges on the way and I’ll make juice to go along with the omelet I am going to make you.”

  Jack rose back up, squeezed a long stream of water into his mouth, and then kissed Melanie softly. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Melanie took her bottle back and took a long gulp of water, and then, as she looked down the length of the bottle, her eyes narrowed.

  A man in a trench coat and sunglasses stood a hundred feet farther along the Capitol Reflecting Pool, facing her. He was looking at them both, and he made no effort to avoid Melanie’s gaze.

  Jack was unaware of the man behind him. “Ready to head back to the car?”

  Melanie looked away from the man quickly. “Yes. Let’s go.”

  They walked toward Pennsylvania Avenue, away from the direction of the man in the trench coat, but had gotten no more than twenty yards when Melanie reached out and took Jack by the shoulder. “You know what? I hate to do this, but I just remembered I need to get home this morning.”

  Ryan was surprised. “You aren’t coming back to my place?”

  Her face registered disappointment. “No, I’m sorry. I’ve got something I have to take care of for my landlord.”

  “You need help? I’m handy with a screwdriver.”

  “No . . . no, thanks. I’ll take care of it.”

  She saw Jack’s eyes flick around, as if he was looking for a clue as to what really caused her to change her mind.

  Before he could question her further about the sudden change of plans, she asked, “We’re still having dinner tonight in Baltimore with your sister, aren’t we?”

  Jack nodded slowly. “Yes.” He paused. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, not at all. Other than the fact I forgot I had some things I needed to take care of around my place. I also have some stuff to do for work on Monday.”

  “Something you can work on in your apartment, or are you going to Liberty Crossing?” Liberty Crossing was the name of the building complex that housed the ODNI, Melanie Kraft’s place of employment.

  “Just open-source stuff. You know how I am always moonlighting.” She said it with a smile that she hoped did not appear as forced as it felt.

  “I can give you a lift home,” he said, clearly not buying the story, but playing along.

  “No need. I’ll just jump on the Metro at Archives, I’ll be home in no time.”

  “All right,” said Jack, and he kissed her. “Have a good day. I’ll pick you up around five-thirty.”

  “I can’t wait.” As he headed off to his car, she called out to him: “Pick up some OJ on the way home. Take care of that cold.”

  “Thanks.”

  —

  Minutes later Melanie walked north past the Capital Grille toward the Archives Metro Station. As she turned the corner onto 6th Street, she found herself face-to-face with the man in the trench coat.

  “Miss Kraft,” the man said with a polite smile.

  Melanie stopped in her tracks, stared at him for
several seconds, and then said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Still smiling, the man asked, “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t just appear like this.”

  “I can, and I did. I need just a moment of your time.”

  “You can go to hell.”

  “That’s not very polite, Miss Kraft.”

  She began walking again up the hill toward the Metro. “He saw you. Jack saw you.”

  He followed now, matching her brisk pace. “Do you know that, or do you just suspect that?”

  “I assume it. You caught me off guard. I had to give him an obvious brush-off because I didn’t know if you were going to walk right up to us. He picked up on the fact that something was going on. He’s not an idiot.”

  “Intellect doesn’t have anything to do with one’s ability to detect surveillance measures. That comes from training, Melanie.”

  Kraft did not respond; she only continued walking.

  “Where do you think he would have gotten that training?”

  Melanie stopped now. “If you needed to talk, why didn’t you just call me?”

  “Because I wanted to talk in person.”

  “About what?”

  Now the man affected a crooked smile. “Please, Melanie. This won’t take any time at all. I’m parked up on Indiana. We can find someplace quiet.”

  “Dressed like this?” she asked. She looked down at her skintight Lycra running shorts and a form-fitting Puma jacket.

  The man looked her up and down now, taking a little too long to do so. “Why not? I’d take you anywhere looking like that.”

  Melanie groaned to herself. Darren Lipton was not the first lecherous asshole she had met while working in the federal government. He was, however, the first lecherous asshole Melanie had met who was also a senior special agent in the FBI, so she reluctantly followed him to his car.

  SEVENTEEN

  They walked together down the ramp of an underground parking garage that was nearly empty so early on a Saturday morning, and, at Lipton’s direction, they climbed in the front seats of his Toyota Sienna minivan. He put the key in the ignition, but he did not turn the engine over, and they sat in the silence and the near darkness of the garage. Only the faint light of a fluorescent bulb on the concrete wall illuminated their faces.