Fate of the Union

Thirteen

Joe Reeder had never harbored any sexist notions about women drivers, but tonight he might have asked Rogers to drive in any case.

The old shoulder wound from the bullet he’d taken for Bennett was really acting up. Earlier, when he’d tackled Adam Benjamin, getting him out of harm’s way, Reeder had landed hard on that shoulder. He’d already taken a double dose of Patti’s over-the-counter naproxen.

Anyway, she had a heavier foot than he did, and once the media was no longer an issue, the flashers had come on and she had gone for it.

They were in a Bureau car from the motor pool, since Reeder’s Prius was still back at the Constitution Hall parking lot. The unmarked gray Ford Fusion was anonymous enough — looking that the camped-out media paid little or no heed when it had emerged from the underground garage.

As they headed south on snow-cleared I-95, Reeder adjusted his position in the passenger seat, trying to find a spot his shoulder liked. He hadn’t said anything to Rogers and felt sure she hadn’t noticed.

“How’s the shoulder?” she asked.

“Like new.”

“Like hell.”

The woman didn’t miss much. It pleased but also mildly annoyed him that she’d picked up so much from him. Not that she hadn’t come equipped with formidable skills from the start.

“Too bad I’m driving,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“It’d make a great drinking game, the way you’ve moved that seat belt around since we left.”

“I spy with my little eye,” Reeder said, “a big pain in the ass.”

She grinned at the road, taking one hand from the wheel to flip him off in the dashboard glow.

“So that was the first time for you,” he said, after a while. “Taking a life.”

She nodded.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine. If I could skip the damn counseling, I would.”

“Don’t.”

She glanced at him. “Oh?”

“It’s going to hit you. Maybe when you try to sleep next, maybe in a month or two, when your guard’s down.”

“Joe, really. I don’t relish killing that man, but the circumstances made it necessary.”

“Different issue. That shooting board would clear you, even without the Director nudging them. All I’m saying is, don’t blow off the counseling. And when this does hit, don’t think less of yourself. Nothing to do with mental toughness.”

“... Does it get easier?”

“With luck, you’ll never find out.”

Even though I-95 was more direct than, say, veering over to I-81 and down the west side of the state, this route was usually slowed by traffic and what seemed like endless construction.

But tonight they’d gotten lucky and Rogers had made good time, only having to drive on the shoulder twice, a major victory, even with flashers going.

Off the interstate now, she wound around to Virginia 20, hurtling south toward Charlottesville. She hadn’t slowed much for the two-lane, but he was fine with that — no sign of ice, just snow lining the shoulders — and he trusted Rogers implicitly. She was a hell of a driver.

Just before Charlottesville, two vehicles in the oncoming lane, less than a car-length apart, caught Reeder’s attention, the rear one getting ready to pass perhaps. He figured Rogers might slow a little, but she didn’t. She blew by them and he had just enough time to make out two black SUVs with tinted windows. Not a passing situation, but a two-car caravan.

“I’d say those boys were going just under the speed limit,” he told her.

“Yeah? So?”

“Kind of a rarity here in Dukes of Hazzard country.”

“Dukes of what?”

In the side mirror, the taillights of the two SUVs were barely blips in the night, then gone.

Reeder said, “Counterfeiter I busted early on told me, ‘Never commit a misdemeanor while committing a felony.’ We’d just tracked him down on unpaid parking tickets.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe nothing.”

Rogers made the last turn onto the two-lane to the industrial park.

“Should be coming up on the left,” she said, slowing to something less than the speed of light.

They passed a service road lined with trees. A car was parked along there, lights out, pluming smoke, condensation from the exhaust on the cold night. Reeder looked back but the row of trees blocked his view.

She turned into the industrial park. A cluster of buildings were on the right side of the road, but only two on the left, their silhouettes in the moonlight tallying with Bryson’s photo of one such building. She swung into a drive that took them into a snow-covered parking lot between the pair of concrete bunker-like structures. These buildings didn’t seem to get a lot of traffic, but tire tracks said someone had been here, and recently.

She shut off the engine.

He asked her, “Did you see a car parked back there?”

“Where?”

“On that service road — just sitting there in the dark. Engine running?”

“What service road?”

“Never mind.”

“Joe, we can go back and check it out if you like.”

He considered that. “No, just me being jumpy, I guess. I get that way after ducking bullets.”

She half smirked. “Then maybe you should stop jumping into the line of fire.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

She opened her door and crisp cold air came in. But she glanced at him and asked, “You’re sure you don’t want to go back for another look?”

“What,” he said, opening his own door, “and interrupt some kids playing hide the salami? Let’s do what we came for.”

He joined her on her side of the Fusion, a building on their left and right. There was a compact battering ram in the trunk but first he and Rogers would check the buildings out. By current rulings, they had enough probable cause and needed no warrants.

“Which one first?” she asked, patting gloved hands, her breath visible. “Joe?”

That parked motor-running car he’d seen — what kind was it? He’d gotten just a glance, not even a glimpse of plates... but was it a Nissan? An Altima, like the rental he’d seen at Bryson’s office? He grabbed Rogers by the arm and threw her to the snowy cement and fell on top of her.

“What the hell?” she said, from under him. He would have explaining to do, if he was wrong; one minute from now, he would seem some aging letch or maybe paranoid over-the-hill former man of action, on edge from what had gone down at Constitution Hall.

“Joe!” she said into his coat. “Goddamnit, what—”

The two buildings exploded.

Two buildings but one big blast, the first concussion wave from the right hitting the car and shaking it like a brat before the wave from their left struck them, flopping them back against the driver’s side door; they slid down as blasting heat came from both sides at once, Reeder doing his best to protect Rogers as fiery debris rained down on them.

The main blasts were over in seconds that felt much longer, and when he finally uncovered his head, orange and blue flames were dancing madly in both buildings, mirror-image conflagrations, flickering limbs reaching skyward through blown-off roofs.

He rolled off her and she sat up, leaning on her gloved palms.

“You okay?” he asked. With his ears ringing like that, he must have been shouting, but she’d be experiencing the same temporary hearing loss.

“Yeah,” she said, just as loud, getting to her feet, brushing off snow and debris.

The all-encompassing sound of buildings on fire always struck Reeder as oddly similar to a rainstorm, even generating its own thunder.

Wild-eyed, she asked him, “How did you know that was going to happen? You’re not a damn building reader.”

He brushed himself off. “I didn’t know, and I could have been wrong, and God knows how I would have explained jumping you like that. But it came to me that car I saw could’ve been the Nissan at Bryson’s office that night.”

“The missing rental?”

He nodded. “The BOLO we sent out didn’t turn it up, so he must have switched plates.”

“You think he made us and waited till we were close before hitting a detonator?”

“I do. Or else the explosives had been set shortly before we got here, and we were just in the wrong place at the right time.”

But halfway through that she stopped looking at him, in fact staring past him, and he was about to turn and see for himself when she took off at a dead run for the building on their left.

They’d both survived twin explosions, and now she was running into one of the burning buildings? Was she crazy? Was he crazy, too?

Because he found himself instinctively dashing right behind her...

Covering his mouth and nose with his bent, Burberry-clad arm, he followed her through what was left of glass doors that were only a scorched framework with not even the shattered remains of their panes in sight. Smoke rushed to greet them as they stepped into a furnace at least equal to the explosion’s heat waves.

While what remained of the post-blast concrete structure itself wouldn’t burn, plenty of flammable material had been in here, judging from the flames licking all around them. Despite thickening smoke, he could make out the twisted remains of a sort of lab-cum-machine shop. That meant chemicals in here might any moment ignite into secondary explosions; he shoved that thought away as he went to Rogers’s side, just a few feet into the hellish sauna that had been a building.

Covering her face with her coat sleeve, Rogers knelt over a body on the floor. If it hadn’t been near the exploded doorway, neither of them would have noticed it from the parking lot. The blackened thing that had been a person lay on its stomach, and the only way Reeder could tell this had been a male was the body’s size and its work boots.

Rogers gripped a hand under one arm of the charred victim, and Reeder grabbed the other one by the forearm. The blackened limb came off at the elbow. That sent both Reeder and Rogers off balance, almost falling, but then Reeder discarded the limb and got a better hold on the body’s shoulder and dragged the remains well out into the middle of the parking lot, next to the Fusion, where an oasis of air existed between where plumes of black and gray smoke surged into the sky and met each other, creating a terrible roiling storm cloud that held no moisture at all. Both Rogers and Reeder were coughing now, and the corpse fell from their grasp, onto its side.

Reeder looked toward the service road, but the tree line blocked his view — not that the Nissan was likely still around.

Breathing hard, intermittently coughing, Rogers plopped down, sitting in the snow, her back against the driver’s side door. Reeder’s own breathing was labored, too, smoke mingling with cold air to burn his lungs.

Reeder asked, “What were you thinking?”

“I knew he was probably dead, but with him there, on the floor... just inside the door? Had to try. If you’d seen him first, you’d have done the same thing.”

“Hell I would.”

“Oh, you didn’t follow me in there?”

“You weren’t dead. Yet.” His breath was beginning to slow. “Those two SUVs? Guys in them set the bombs. Their leader was in that Nissan, giving them time to get well away before he detonated the charges.”

“Then... then we showed up.”

“If he recognized me as we drove past — this was likely our blond perp — he knew he’d scored a bonus round. If you and I hadn’t chatted a while in the car, we’d have already been inside when he hit the detonator.”

“We... we’d have been... scattered all over this parking lot... with the rest of the debris.”

Sirens sang their distant song. This was the boonies, but somebody had seen the flames rising into the sky, and/or heard the big boom.

Their breathing slowing, the air clearing some, the smoke on its upward trajectory, the two got up and had a look at their rescued corpse. Only the figure’s back was charred black, the front of him appearing relatively normal — his expression almost serene, as if he’d slept through the other side of him getting cooked.

“Dead before the explosion,” Rogers said.

Reeder pointed out the two punctures in the blackened back of his neck — barely visible but the indentations were there, all right.

“Double-tapped,” Rogers said.

Reeder nodded and looked back toward the trees on the other side of which was the service road. Just then flames illuminated something over that way, and glass winked and blinked at him.

A sniper scope.

“Gun!” he said, and then came the muzzle flash.

They both hit the snowy cement, sending up puffs of white, then each scrambled around behind the car, Reeder around front, Rogers around back. The shooter had seen that action through his scope, because two more rounds slammed into the car, and then another took the back left tire, which hissed as if a villain had come on stage, and hadn’t he?

Each sat with their backs to the passenger side of the Fusion. Breathing hard again, Reeder said, “You got extra magazines?”

“Yeah. Two.”

“Good. Keep him busy.”

“What do you mean, keep him busy?”

“Do it.”

From around the rear of the car, Rogers threw shots into the line of trees. She had a handgun and the shooter had a rifle and the advantage of firepower and distance were his. But she kept it up, the sharp cracks of her Glock rising over the rumbling murmur of the burning buildings.

She was shooting as Reeder took off, very low, right toward the facing fires, running between them and skirting around the building at left and staying parallel to it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d run on snow. He was trying to be careful in the dark, trying not to trip over any chunks of debris, and was grateful for the minimal moonlight and even fire glow, assuming it didn’t give him away.

As he reached where the building ended and concrete parking lot yawned to a strip of snowy landscape with the line of trees waiting, he climbed out of his Burberry and left it behind, his dark suit better suited for his purpose.

With the night alternating pops of the Glock and resonant reports from the rifle, Reeder headed over to where the service road curved around behind the buildings, the line of trees ending where that curve began. As the shooter exchanged shots with Rogers, the rifle’s scope would not be swung way the hell over here. Or so Reeder told himself as he kept very low on the asphalt, as low as possible and still run.

Any other Tuesday night, this industrial park would be all but silent. An occasional car would thrum by, the odd owl might hoot, tree leaves might rustle with wind; but tonight was a cacophony of howling flames, screaming sirens, crunching snow, all punctuated by the bellows of his own labored breathing.

Reeder wanted to surprise the shooter, and if he made it to that stand of trees, he just might do that. One small detail, though: he was unarmed. He rarely carried a gun and his extending baton was back in his car at Constitution Hall, where he’d left the weapon before passing through metal detectors and security.

And in the midst of his unarmed pursuit of a man with a rifle, it came to him: the would-be assassin had gotten a .45 into the event! How the hell had he managed that?

That thought he filed away for later use, should he survive this lopsided encounter.

But as he reached the row of trees lining the service road, he tucked himself behind the nearest one, peeking around to see what his options were...

... and the guy, all in black, including a stocking cap (blond under there, he’d bet), was leaving his position between trees to jog to the parked Nissan. With sirens growing ever louder, the guy was bailing, just getting the hell out.

That was a kind of break, because the unarmed Reeder could pursue the shooter, since a rifle was a poor weapon to try to use on the move. With some luck he could come up behind him and take the man down; but the black-clad figure heard Reeder’s running steps in back of him, glanced over his shoulder, and kept going, even faster.

Reeder summoned more speed somehow and was closing the distance when the shooter reached the car, spun and raised the rifle to his shoulder like a hunter who just spotted a very stupid deer.

The night-shattering report was in his ears as Reeder dove for the asphalt, then rolled onto snowy ground and scrambled into the trees, ducking behind the nearest one, which took a shot meant for him, spewing fragmented bark and splintered wood.

When Reeder eased out for a look, red brake lights signaled the Nissan’s hesitation just before the vehicle turned onto the road, and was gone.

For perhaps thirty seconds, Reeder — his shoulder screaming louder than the sirens — leaned forward with his hands on the knees of legs whose muscles were burning with an intensity to rival the buildings, and he breathed slowly, slowly, slowly, trying not to die.

Rogers came trotting up through the trees. “And you gave me shit for trying to save somebody in a burning building?”

“You can’t... can’t... save... a... corpse.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know it was a corpse. And you knew that was a guy with a rifle. You aren’t armed, are you?”

He stood erect. Shook his head.

She came over and took his arm and squeezed. “You okay?”

“Let me ask you something,” Reeder said.

“What?”

“Metal detectors, security people, how did our ex — Ohio state trooper get into Constitution Hall?”

“This came to you now?”

“Just now.”

Her eyebrows lifted as her breath smoked. “Well, I imagine Bohannon and Wade are all over that. We can check with them. But let’s deal with this first.”

Walking between trees, Rogers supported Reeder by the arm, and back across the snowy ground and then snowy cement to where fire trucks and police cars were parading into the lot.

Rogers had her cell out. “I’ll make sure Bohannon and Wade are as smart as you are, and then I’ll let Miggie know what happened here.”

While she did that, Reeder went over to speak to the first uniformed policeman on site. He still had the FBI consultant’s ID in his billfold from last year, and he hoped that would suffice.

The cop climbing from the first squad car was well scrubbed and wore a navy-blue winter jacket with a Charlottesville badge on the left and “CHANEY” on a patch on the right.

As Reeder approached, the young cop’s eyes grew wide and his steamy breath came more quickly.

“You’re Joe Reeder!” he said, amazed, extending his hand.

As gloved hands shook, Reeder thought, About damn time this hero crap paid off.

“It’s an honor, Mr. Reeder.”

Reeder nodded. “Officer Chaney. First name?”

“Tim, sir.”

“Tim,” Reeder said, jerking a thumb toward the destruction around him. “You’ve arrived in the middle of an incident relating to a federal investigation. It’s going to be a very long night for all of us. But first we need a BOLO out on a Nissan Altima. And I have plates for you.”

As he continued to fill Chaney in, firefighters were hard at it, spraying down the twin blazes. The fiftyish chief — an obvious veteran, cool and in command — supervised and quickly called for reinforcements. EMTs were putting the corpse on a stretcher, with no pretense of trying to save an obviously dead body. Rogers was with them, getting pictures of the deceased with her cell.

“You need your detectives out here, Tim,” Reeder advised the young uniform. “The FBI will be handling the investigation, but your people will be in on it. This is arson and murder, for starters.”

The kid was doing a good job tamping down the celebrity worship. He said, “Yes, sir,” and called dispatch on his shoulder radio.

Her pictures taken, and seeing Reeder was no longer talking to the cop, Rogers headed back over, shaking her head.

“What?” he asked.

“Bohannon and Wade had the same thought you did, only about four hours ago. They’ve been watching security video.”

“Lucky them.”

“Not a single damn frame of Stanton coming through the metal detectors.”

Reeder thought about that, briefly. “If he didn’t come in the front, then he came in the back.”

She nodded. “Inside job, then.”

“Was the security a mix of Constitution Hall’s own people and Benjamin’s?”

“Yes, but mostly Benjamin’s.” She frowned. “Did one of them let somebody in to take out their own boss?”

“That’s a good solid maybe,” Reeder said. “Nasty as that is, at least we have somewhere to start.”

Rogers’s cell phone vibrated in her hand. She looked at the caller ID and put it on speaker so Reeder could hear.

She said, “What do you have, Miggie?”

“Like to know why those two buildings blew?”

“We’re on the scene, standing in the glow of two fires, and you know why the buildings blew?”

“I do,” he said with a smile in his voice. “We got lab results on Bryson’s clothes. Either of you ever hear of something called Senkstone?”

She gave Reeder a raised eyebrow look.

He said, “That’s s-e-n-k Senkstone?”

“Surely is,” Miggie said. His voice was crisp and confident coming from the tiny cell speaker. “Five years ago, Senkstone was a failed plastic explosive — real next-gen stuff, but unstable as hell. So the company responsible shut down. Well, there were traces of the stuff on Bryson’s clothes.”

“Judging by the fires around us,” Rogers said, “it may still be unstable.”

“More likely,” Reeder said, leaning in for Miggie to hear, “someone figured out how to stabilize it, and for some as yet unknown reason, decided to cover up that discovery.”

Rogers said, “I’m sending you some pictures, Miggie. See if you can ID the guy before we get back.”

“Can you send me his prints?”

“Can’t. Burned off.”

She sent the pics and ended the call. Then she looked at Reeder and said, “So this is what date night is like with Joe Reeder, huh?”

“Now you know why my ex divorced me,” he said.

She shrugged. “At least it’s not boring.”