The Golden Gate, page 2
The acting secretary’s aide had been out here in the Bay Area since the bombing, and his eyelids drooped as though he had been awake the whole time.
Ben Shepard brushed with a three-fingered hand at rain that had soaked his suit when he had dashed through the downpour from the Lincoln and boarded the jet. “The storm’s still sitting across SFO and San Jose like a gorilla, Mister Secretary. The Golden Gate’s still closed, so accessing the city from the north is terrible. This was as close as we could get you, sir.”
Petrie frowned. “How close is that?”
Shepard shrugged wet shoulders. “With the escort, you should be in your suite in an hour and a half. The rest of the staff’s there now, preparing a full brief for you.”
Arthur Petrie kept frowning. He didn’t want a full brief. He wanted a full breakfast. Thirteen hours before he had been hustled out of a New Year’s morning meet-and-greet brunch in Paris, introducing him to his opposite numbers in the NATO countries.
Hustled out because California had been attacked, and somebody in the West Wing had decided that the Department of Homeland Security needed to look concerned about a state that later this year would cast fifty-five electoral votes for the next president of the United States.
So instead of quality Frog food and wine, Arthur had eaten too many airplane peanuts from a jar, washed them down with blended scotch from the plane’s galley that proved the government really did buy from the lowest bidder, then tried to sleep sitting up, in his clothes, for most of the flight.
He stood, stretched, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. “Can you tell me enough during the drive over so I can tap out of the briefing?”
Shepard rubbed his own eyes, nodded. Dark circles painted the skin beneath them, and blood let by a razor nick had dried on his collar. “I thought you might be anxious to get into the loop, sir. I worked up a prebrief summary during the night.”
The secretary stepped forward to the plane’s open doorway, and paused. Outside, the rain now merely trickled through the chill air, a few wide-spaced drops wrinkling the puddles that glistened on the tarmac. He sighed again.
He had brought Shepard along with him when he moved from the Senate to the cabinet. Ben Shepard was his second ex-infantry aide, and the first with a Purple Heart, plus a visible dismemberment that advertised Petrie’s Sincere Support For Our Troops.
Grunt vets were as loyal as Labrador retrievers. But brighter, at least if they had been officers. They worked themselves to exhaustion without complaint, said “sir” if you so much as farted, and the brownie points for hiring them were off the charts. Petrie had fired the first one only because the guy had not only the loyalty of a Labrador retriever but also a similar political IQ.
The more universal problem with ex-grunts in government as a class wasn’t that they believed bad food and staying out in the rain were small prices to pay for the privilege of serving their country. The problem was they assumed everybody else in government believed the same thing.
The secretary turned to his drenched, shivering aide. “There are still drops out there. Next time, remember to bring me an umbrella.”
* * *
As the three-vehicle convoy sped toward San Francisco it ran again under rain that thundered on the Lincoln’s roof. Petrie chewed Tums from the accessories bag that Shepard carried for him, while Shepard leaned across the Lincoln’s rear compartment from his jump seat and passed executive summary pages to his boss.
The lights of the Suburbans ahead and behind flashed in through the Lincoln’s windows, so Shepard’s drawn features turned from paste white to pale blue and back to white six times every second. Jet lag, a peanut gut bomb, and cheap scotch were already making Arthur ache from his brain to his ass. The disco show made it worse. He squeezed his eyes closed.
Shepard said, “The instant wisdom was that it was Boston Marathon copycats, sir.”
Secretary Petrie opened his eyes, then unwrapped a granola bar from Shepard’s bag. “The instant wisdom was wrong?”
Shepard nodded. “In the first place, there was only one casualty.”
Petrie chuckled. “The average terrorist’s too stupid to plan a good crap.”
Shepard shook his head. “Actually, the inference the response team’s drawing from the casualty is this incident wasn’t terrorism, sir. And the bombers weren’t stupid.”
The secretary wrinkled his brow. “Five-thousand-person footrace event. Bomb so big it blows a car sky-high. Defiles a goddam American landmark. How’s that not terrorism?”
Shepard rubbed his gimp hand with his good one. “The bomb wasn’t actually that big. Not even a bomb, really. Explosively Formed Penetrator emplaced under the bridge deck. Sort of a cannon shot up into the car’s belly. Neither we nor our correspondent foreign intelligence services saw the spike in terrorist community chatter that usually precedes an attack. And none of the usual suspects, foreign or domestic, have claimed responsibility. Besides, the casualty doesn’t seem random.”
The secretary raised his eyebrows at that last. “Oh?”
“Manuel Colibri.”
“Who?”
“I’d barely heard of him myself. But everybody’s heard of Cardinal Systems. Apparently he deflects the spotlight onto the people in his organization who do good work. But he’s—was—the CEO.”
The secretary’s eyebrows rose higher. “I missed a sixty-one Chateau Latour because somebody whacked a one-percenter?”
“Maybe. I mean, the thing still seems like terrorism. We’re hitting it hard like it is, sir. Yes, if it hadn’t been for the storm, there could’ve been more casualties. But not massive losses. The bomb was planted a half mile from the crowd. If the idea was to kill and maim people the same explosives could have been planted in a backpack full of nails near the start line. And the race start wasn’t until fifty minutes after the detonation, so the north end of the bridge was nearly empty when the device was set off.”
“Set off how?”
“Remote transmission. Basically, dialing a number on a cell phone.” Shepard rubbed his hand again and stared at the rain. “So simple a twelve-year-old Iraqi can do it.”
“So foreign nationals were involved?”
Shepard shook his head. “Only if you count Kenyans.”
“What?”
“Between the rain and the power outage there’s no useful imagery from the traffic and surveillance cameras on the bridge. The only significant eyewitness evidence we’ve got so far comes from a Kenyan distance runner who was warming up out on the bridge when the storm hit. He was sixty yards away from the bomb when it blew.”
“He saw something?”
“He saw there was nobody in Colibri’s car but the driver. He saw, beside the traffic lane, what he describes as a heavy man. To a Kenyan, that could be anybody who weighs over one forty. The man was wearing a ski mask and jogging clothes. When the device detonated, this man was running back toward the crowd at the starting line, but looking over his shoulder. He apparently got lost in the panic after the explosion.”
“There was a footrace. He was wearing jogging clothes. It was cold. He was wearing a ski mask. There was an explosion. He ran the other way. What’s suspicious?”
“The Kenyan said that, as the guy ran, he threw something the size of a phone over the side of the bridge.”
Petrie’s jaw dropped so far that he drooled granola crumbs. “We found it?”
Shepard shook his head again. “The storm chased the police boats and helicopters that would have been below and above the race. We can’t even find the car. Speaking of which, if the sun ever shines again, the water under the Golden Gate turns out to be three hundred feet deep. And the currents pump two million cubic feet of water under the bridge every second. So there’s no telling where what’s left of the car or of Colibri ended up, Mr. Secretary.”
Petrie drummed his fingers on his armrest as his convoy blew past snarled California traffic. “Mr. Secretary.” He liked the sound of it even better than he had liked “Senator.”
Arthur Petrie got this job because he had called the loudest and most visibly for his predecessor to quit it after the Port of Savannah fiasco. Also because Petrie’s poll numbers had convinced him that another Senate campaign was as promising as jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. And mostly because Arthur Petrie knew where just enough bodies were buried on Capitol Hill that he could get nominated and confirmed.
Pending hearings, he had drifted in interim limbo for six weeks, with the compromise title of Acting Secretary.
He swallowed.
The prospect of being on the witness’s side of the confirmation hearing room table made him even dizzier. Arthur had a few buried bodies of his own.
He knew real estate. He knew politics. About terrorism he knew dick. But he had assumed that, Savannah notwithstanding, the Department of Homeland Security had people for that.
He yawned, tossed his crumpled granola bar wrapper to Shepard, then closed his eyes and leaned back for a minute while his intestines made gas and his head pounded.
He fervently hoped that those people at DHS were managing his first crisis more competently than Shepard was managing his diet. Arthur was tired enough that he dozed anyway.
* * *
“Sir?” Shepard’s voice woke him.
Petrie’s aide hung up the rear cabin phone that connected to the stretch’s driver, then raised the Cardinal C-phone that he held in his other hand. “Sir, they say they may have him.”
“Have who?”
“The guy the Kenyan saw. The guy running away on the Golden Gate Bridge.”
THREE
Arthur Petrie sat up in the limo’s back seat, head pounding, but eyes wide, and blinked at his aide. “What do you mean they have the guy? Just like that? How?”
Across from Arthur, Shepard squirmed in the limo’s jump seat like he was about to confess to chopping down a cherry tree.
Arthur sighed. Shepard’s pussyfooting when he had to share classified information with his own boss always made Arthur’s head hurt, which was the last thing he needed just now.
Shepard said, “The unclassified euphemism in the mid-2000s was ‘The Find.’”
The acting secretary turned up his eyes and scanned the limo’s headliner. “Does this look like a fucking TV studio to you, Shepard?”
“Sir?”
“I want an answer, not a Jeopardy question.”
Shepard pressed his lips together, then said, “Yes, sir. By my second tour in Iraq, among other intel methods, the U.S. was already tracking insurgent’s phones by their GPS chips, and eavesdropping by a ‘backdoor’ built in to most phones to defeat their encryption systems. Even when the insurgents thought their phones were off. Not that anybody admitted it then. When I asked why we were finally getting decent intel, one guy just told me ‘The Find.’”
Shepard frowned. “A few years later, it turned out the NSA was doing more or less the same thing to people here in the U.S. Sort of made some of us wonder what kind of government we’d been fighting for. Today most of the manufacturers have stopped building in backdoors. Or at least they’ve stopped admitting it.”
Arthur cocked his head. He had never understood why government surveillance offended otherwise clever people like Shepard. Government’s job was screwing over the governed, and it couldn’t do its job if it didn’t know what the governed were up to.
Shepard said, “We knew from what the Kenyan saw that the bomb was detonated by what we assumed was a phone that was located somewhere between the center of the Golden Gate and the bridge’s North Tower. At the time, there were thousands of phones behind the start line at the south end of the bridge, but just the one near the north end.”
“But he threw his phone away.”
Shepard shook his head. “This phone’s not in the bay at the moment. So he threw away something else.”
“What was that?”
“This guy improvised a radio-controlled explosively formed penetrator. If he was smart enough to build and deploy an RCEFP, he was smart enough to know that a high-profile event like this race might rate shutting off the cellphone towers in the neighborhood. Exactly so a phone in a bomb couldn’t receive a detonation command from another phone. The towers weren’t shut off, but he couldn’t have planned on that.”
“Then how—?”
“Kids’ walkie-talkies can do directly what two phones do via cell towers. Especially if the guy holding the transmitter’s fifty yards from the receiver, like he was. Amazon’ll deliver a pair of walkie-talkies that don’t have tracking chips for under sixty bucks.”
Arthur stroked his chin, nodded.
Shepard said, “What NSA’s tracking is a phone the bomber probably had in his pocket while he waited for Colibri’s car.”
The secretary narrowed his eyes. “Why would he have a phone in his pocket? If he’s so smart, he knows about tracking chips. Does this guy want to get caught?”
Shepard said, “Actually, that’s exactly what he wants. At least the psychologists say that’s the most probable scenario. Or maybe he’s just not that smart. Bomb building’s not simple, but it’s not rocket science.”
“But NSA’s rocket science is. For whatever reason he’s carrying this phone? And they’re tracking it?”
Shepard nodded. “They place it in a house in Redwood Heights. That’s a residential neighborhood on the south side of Oakland. Local SWAT’s clearing the area and surrounding the place right now.”
The secretary’s eyes widened. Whether smart, stupid or suicidal, Arthur Petrie wanted to kiss this guy right through his ski mask. The confirmation hearing narrative had just changed. Now, the story would be how in six short weeks Arthur Petrie had flipped a dysfunctional agency like he had flipped all those on-the-skids malls of his. Terrorist bomb hurts nobody except some rich guy. Terrorist nabbed within forty-eight hours. Case closed.
Arthur Petrie had transitioned from real estate speculator to politician in the first place by being shocked—shocked!—at problems he knew dick about, then blaming them on somebody else. The tactic had propelled him from the House to the Senate and now almost into the cabinet.
But these circumstances were new to him. Government was actually about to do something efficient and useful. Better yet, he could take credit for it.
Arthur drummed fingers against his chin.
Of course, there was always the danger that whoever had actually done the work might get the credit, and he would look like a clueless bystander.
Suddenly the forward Suburban blipped its siren, then Arthur was thrown left in his seat as the convoy cut to the right across traffic and shot down an exit ramp.
Shepard said, “Sir, before I woke you I took the initiative to redirect us to the field operation command post in Redwood Heights. Apparently the media’s got wind. I thought somebody in authority, like you, should be on site to keep the media informed.”
The acting secretary rubbed his chin stubble. Shepard’s bag contained an electric razor reserved for Arthur. He didn’t ask for it. Haggard warrior was the better look. He could even get the protective detail boys in the Suburbans to Velcro him into one of those bulletproof vests they wore.
He reached across the compartment, slapped Shepard’s knee, and smiled. “Now that’s political IQ, Shepard! A politician’s aide puts himself in his boss’s shoes.”
Shepard squirmed in his seat. “Actually, sir, I was just putting myself in the shoes of the grunts on the ground. When the Congressional junkets came to Iraq we’d use the politicians as bait.”
Arthur straightened, brows-up. Shepard didn’t seem that devious. Maybe he had underestimated the man. “You put members of Congress in the line of fire?”
Shepard shook his head. “No, sir! Not bait for the insurgents. Bait to draw off the camera crews. So we could go to war in peace.”
* * *
Seven minutes later the Lincoln and the Suburbans, their lights and sirens long since off, were waved over on a steep street of fifties-vintage bungalows. The landscaping was mature but overgrown, and most of them had the curb appeal of dog kennels.
The cop who waved them over was black, younger than Shepard, and wore a rain slicker. One of those clear plastic shower caps covered his cop hat, and a walkie-talkie’s stubby antenna protruded above the raincoat’s lapel. The last person Arthur had seen dressed like that was when he was twelve, and the person had been a school crossing guard.
Arthur’s protective detail piled out of the Suburbans, heads on swivels, cleared the area, then waved him and Shepard out of the Lincoln. Nobody even offered Arthur a bulletproof vest.
Shepard, who was nothing if not a quick study, hopped out, popped open the golf umbrella in his hand, then held it above the car door while his boss climbed out quite dry. Also quite bravely, considering his torso was unarmored against sniper fire.
The cop in the rain slicker approached them, saluting like a Boy Scout. He leaned close and spoke up to be heard over the drum of rain and the rush of runoff down the curbside gutters. “Mr. Secretary, I’m Officer Gerald Waters.”
“You’re in charge, here?”
“Of outside agency liaison for this critical incident, yessir. The incident tactical commander’s closer to the objective while the other elements move into position.”
The secretary looked around.
A black SWAT van, rear doors open to a depopulated interior, was parked twenty yards further up the street. Another slickered cop closed the van’s doors, then scurried back inside the van’s cab.
What the hell? Arthur Petrie was the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Frigging Security, but instead of the command post he was out here in overflow parking with a PR flack dressed up like the safety patrol.
The black cop cleared his throat. “May I orient you to the area of operations, Mr. Secretary?”
That sounded professional. Arthur nodded.
The black cop walked them across the street with two of the protective detail’s members trailing behind.
The lot that the cop led them across was vacant except for a worn concrete slab and a rusted roll off hopper, overstuffed with a jigsaw of shingles, plaster, and slabs of sledgehammered brick.
