STEVE SITS RAMROD STRAIGHT. IF HE COULD, I KNOW HE’D salute me.
He’s wearing a black sleeveless Puffa jacket that draws the eye to his amputated right arm. His head brushes the roof of his makeshift home, a piece of orange tarp suspended from a rope fixed between two trees. Steve is in a wheelchair. He doesn’t want to get involved, so the meeting is off the record. I do not know his second name. I don’t need to.
The only other things in here are a plastic chair and a shopping cart. The cart contains a plastic bag full of clothing, a prosthetic leg and an American flag. The night-time temperature has been cold enough to freeze the contents of a slop bucket beneath it.
Steve is clean-shaven, with closely cropped black hair, in his early forties, maybe. He calls Hayes ‘Isaac’.
The Settlement is a two-hundred-strong community that has sprung up beneath an overpass on a patch of parkland between the river and 26th and K. Steve’s tent sits right in the middle of it.
Hetta and I met the Reverend Hayes at a hole in the fence that has been erected around the site by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The whole place is like some Hollywood version of a Civil War tableau: men hunched in the mud and snow, government-issue blankets over their shoulders, staring into the embers of campfires. All it lacks is a guy playing a harmonica.
Steve motions Hetta to the chair. Hayes and I crouch by the opening. The light comes from a battery-operated storm lamp that’s running low on juice. It is still an hour before sunrise, but there’s a steady rumble of traffic from the overpass.
Steve turns to me before the Reverend Hayes can introduce us. ‘You were the guy that tried to talk him down. You were the guy in the tower.’
‘Yes.’
‘I read you’re the President’s doctor. That true?’
‘It is.’
‘Slick Bob for real?’ He wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve.
‘I’m just his doctor.’
‘They said you were a combat medic.’
‘Also true. What happened to you?’
‘My Stryker got hit by an RPG. Mosul, 2004. I was the only one to get out. I was lucky.’
‘Lucky?’ Hetta says.
‘Yes, ma’am. Lucky. I lost an arm and a leg. I cried when I saw the Towers go down. But the tragedy of my life is that I took it as an article of faith that my government knew more’n I did.’
I look to the Reverend Hayes, a softly spoken man sporting a clerical vest and dog collar beneath a plain green, Vietnam-style combat jacket. He is black, earnest and heavy-set, with deep lines in his forehead. His dusting of hair is almost entirely gray. He has been distributing food, water and essential medicines to the inhabitants of the Settlement for the past fifteen years.
At 17.24 yesterday, he called Health and Human Services to report a conversation that a member of his community had allegedly had with the protester.
The call was routed to the Virginia Fusion Center, one of a score around the country to merge intelligence from local, state and national law enforcement, as well as every three-letter agency, to provide threat data on anyone who has the potential to become a ‘near-lethal approacher’ – someone capable of killing the President.
‘Just tell them,’ Hayes says gently, ‘what you told me.’
Steve takes the roll-up he’s laid on the arm of his wheelchair, tamps down the loose tobacco at both ends, gives it a final inspection, and places it between his lips. He leans forward and lights it with a Zippo emblazoned with a blue and yellow unit badge. The 24th Infantry Regiment took a pretty heavy pounding in Mosul. I know, because I was there.
‘What happened?’
Hetta leaves the talking to me. She doesn’t need to compete with the connection between two combat veterans.
‘It was Friday night. Couple nights before the storm. Someone had lit a fire an’ it drew a bunch of new people. The guy stuck to himself, but he was watchin’ everything. He was wearin’ this mask … like a balaclava …’
He takes down some smoke and exhales slowly.
‘The next night he’s back. It’s late. Two, maybe three in the mornin’. I don’t sleep great, ’cos I sleep in my chair. Everybody else has turned in and it’s just him an’ me and he’s starin’ at the flames. I ask his name and he tells me it’s John.’
‘John?’
‘Yeah. He says it in this weird way. “I, John”, like it really means somethin’, which is kinda funny, ’cos it’s only afterward, when I see the news, I realize he’s done given me the name of the church. But everybody here’s runnin’ from some shit or other.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘He tells me he’s ex-military, that he’s picked up some injuries and that he’s sick to shit with the fact we’re fightin’ countries we can’t fuckin’ spell. Well, I heard it all before. I may not like the government, but I love my country. When I ask him what he’s gonna do about it, he tells me somethin’ people are gonna remember. He’s gonna mount a protest at the church where the President goes. He wants the world to know.’
‘To know what?’ Hetta asks.
‘That things can’t go on the way they bin goin’. That things gonna change.’
I glance at Hetta. ‘Did he say in what way?’
‘Yeah. In a way the whole world gonna know about.’
‘I mean details.’
He laughs. ‘Too fuckin’ many. He tells me everything. He’s gonna reach it through the sewer system. He’s made a study of it and knows which parts to use and which parts to avoid. He’s got tools for bustin’ into the church. He knows how to cover his tracks. Ya-de-ya …’
He looks at me and holds up his hands. ‘I’m sorry, man, truly I am. I shoulda told Isaac sooner, but I thought the guy was fuckin’ nuts. I didn’t know he was really gonna do it.’
Steve is a proud man whose world fell apart when his wife left him, taking their two children with her back to Columbia, South Carolina. He retrained as a bookkeeper, but he’s been at the Settlement for three years now. He prefers it to the shelters established by the Mayor in a bid to rid the capital of its ten thousand homeless. They’re rife with every kind of abuse, which gives an edge to my next question.
‘The Reverend Hayes said that the guy made you touch him. Is that true?’
‘Yeah. That’s when I knew he wasn’t just crazy, but weird.’
‘Describe what happened.’
His smoke has spluttered out. He lights it again.
‘When he’s done tellin’ me what he’s gonna do, he gets up, walks over and squats down in front of me so we’re eyeballin’ each other. I have no idea what this guy is on, really I don’t. But those eyes jus’ keep watchin’ me. And then, very slowly, he takes off his ski mask. Well, I seen some combat injuries …’
I wait for him to collect his thoughts.
‘I look at him for as long as I can and then, when I can’t stand it no more, I turn. He grabs my hand real hard an’ pulls it to his face an’, like, holds it there … against the knots an’ the scars. I ask what the fuck he thinks he’s doin’ and he just stares back at me and says: “Remember”.’
‘Remember?’
‘Yeah.’ He shakes his head. ‘Like I’m ever gonna forget.’
Hetta and I stand on a spit of land overlooking the river between the Settlement and the Watergate complex.
To the south, the early morning commuter traffic is building on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. To the northwest, the face of the Healy Clock Tower shines across the Georgetown University campus. The snow on the rooftops gives the oldest part of the city a fairytale quality I’ve never seen before.
Scarcely a breath of wind plays on the river’s surface. The reflection of the lights from Arlington and Rosslyn is disturbed by a lone rower who’s plotting a course against the current toward the Alexandria Aqueduct. Blocks of ice bob in the reeds by the water’s edge.
Hetta is convinced Voss entered the capital by boat – most probably a collapsible canoe. She’s asked Lefortz to authorize the Service’s uniformed branch to search for it along the riverbank, called for a review of all imagery of the river, and for a forensics team to survey the culverts, sewers and drains between the Settlement and the church.
Four or five miles away, the Potomac hits open country. It would have taken Voss a couple of hours, if that, to navigate to where we’re standing, ditch the canoe and make his way to the Settlement and then the church.
The corridor is normally well served by CCTV: the systems within the Watergate complex, the Kennedy Center, and an office building that backs onto the land beneath the overpass all provide a measure of interlocking surveillance.
Camera systems regularly go U/S, but the pattern-mining software the Service uses showed the glitch at the office block had never previously occurred, and was momentary: a few hours at most, but long enough for Voss to have made his way from the river to the camp. So either it was accidental, or it was orchestrated.
When she asks me what I make of Steve’s story, I tell her I just know the assessment I filed for Reuben – that the discussion Voss and I had was lucid and cogent and, on balance, that he probably wasn’t mentally ill – may need revision.
‘That thing he made him do was almost ritualistic,’ she says.
‘Or it had religious significance.’
‘And that “I, John” shit. That’s pure Koresh.’ She looks at me. ‘You’re the shrink. What do you think?’
I cast my mind back to the list she showed me: God, Threat, Proof, Mac, Jerusalem.
Memory, or the lack of it, is important to this guy.
‘How well you remember something depends on how quickly and clearly your senses take in an experience. Seeing and hearing are key, but so too are smell, taste and touch. Getting Steve to run his hands over his burns – especially burns to his face – is powerful because there’s revulsion there. You saw it. Revulsion runs deep. It imprints.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘I don’t know yet. I also have no idea why he would outline all his plans to a total stranger.’
I look at my watch. It’s coming up to seven o’clock. I’ve a couple of hours to prepare for my appointment with Sergeyev. It doesn’t pay to keep the GRU waiting.
But there’s something Hetta needs to show me first.
Marty is a contractor security guard whose duty belt comes with a can of mace and a baton in its holsters. He’s a heavy-set lunk in his late forties with impressive jowls and bushy sideburns.
‘I think we had an open circuit issue,’ he says. ‘It’s done that a few times.’
Hetta scans the rooftops. Dawn is breaking. An aircraft dips behind the Washington Monument on its descent into Reagan. Fast food wrappers skitter across the concrete floor of the empty fourteenth-floor office suite behind us. ‘I need for you to explain to me what that means,’ she says.
I know Marty is grating on her nerves. He grates on mine for sure. But Hetta’s irritation is palpable. I can feel its heat.
‘The tamper circuit is a loop that connects all the infrareds, the shock sensors, the pressure pads and the magnetic contacts throughout the building.’ He rearranges his ill-fitting, company-issue pants by digging into the crotch and giving it a sharp tug. ‘It does what it says on the can. Anyone tries to fuck with the system, the alarm goes off. But occasionally, because ours is brand new and the building isn’t finished, it goes open-circuit – the current stops flowing and it trips.’
This triggers an alert at the dispatch office within the MPD’s First District station on M Street.
‘Was it or wasn’t it a false alarm?’
Marty pulls a face. He doesn’t want to be categorical. There was no one guarding the building Sunday night – there isn’t on weekends – but the system is also linked to his firm’s HQ, so it would have prompted a response. Somebody would have come by and swept the offices.
Once the guy was satisfied it was a false call-out, he would have keyed in his user number, killed it and reset the system. Somehow or other, there must have been a gap between the alarm registering down at the First District and its reclassification as a false positive. Which is how it came to be picked up by the Secret Service’s pattern-mining algorithm.
Marty tilts his oversize head. His gaze shifts somewhere beyond the balcony. ‘I guess MPD had other things on its mind that night, what with that shooting over at the church.’
Lefortz woke me in the middle of the storm. A quarter of four. Six and a half hours after the system tripped.
‘And you say your colleague would have physically swept the building?’
‘Yes, ma’am, he surely would have.’
Hetta gestures to the shell of an office behind us. ‘But not these offices, because these offices are unoccupied.’
‘Come agin?’
‘I want to know whether somebody could have physically accessed the building – these floors up here – while the system was in reset mode.’
Marty doesn’t hesitate. ‘There are multiple sensors, including a hundred or so CCTV cameras, from the ground floor all the way to the roof. It’s physically impossible for someone to get up here without being detected, even with a malfunction in the tamper system.’
‘How come?’
‘Because every camera has a battery back-up unit; they continue to record throughout.’
Hetta lets him know she’s going to pass by later so she can examine the footage, then instructs him to leave us alone. Marty doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes off like a whipped dog.
As the sun comes up, it hits the gold cupola on top of the bell tower, two hundred fifty meters distant. I walk out onto the balcony. It offers a clear line of sight to the church. Police tape crisscrosses the portico. Lights burn within the tower. Forensics teams are still at work inside.
Again I ask myself: why?
St John’s, ‘Church of the Presidents’, is a stone’s throw from the White House.
Why did Guido – Voss – pick it rather than the fence by the North Grounds for his protest? A protest that wasn’t a protest but a warning.
I scan the area between the church and the tall buildings across the street.
‘Hetta? What’s over there?’
She comes and stands next to me.
‘Next to the labor union? Offices. Nothing special.’
‘In the tower, he looked at them. A number of times.’
‘So?’
‘Where was the sniper?’
‘There were multiple snipers.’
‘The guy who shot him.’
‘Not a part of my jurisdiction, Colonel. And the official report isn’t in yet.’ She looks at me. ‘Why?’
I outline the facts, such as they are:
A cold wind blows up from the street.
But here’s the kicker: Voss couldn’t have been in two places at once – the church and Marty’s brand new office building.
And if he had an accomplice, the ‘sad loner’ piece flies out the window.