AFTER OUR EARLY MORNING MEETING AT CIA HEADQUARTERS, NED Mahoney and I were both detailed straight over to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, also in Langley. It’s housed in a secure building called Liberty Crossing, or LX1 for short.
The command center was a cavernous space with the soft lighting of a movie theater. But the volume was more like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and the tension was sky high.
Thousands of personnel had been dispatched to locations all over the city, and reps from every major agency had been assigned to this room, like me. Each area was marked with quickly made signs taped to the front of the desks—HOSTAGE AND RESCUE, MPD, CIA, MOBILE CTOC COMMUNICATIONS, and on it went.
Beyond the rail yard incident itself, we had a whole new element to deal with this morning. As of five a.m., Homeland Security had raised the terror threat level for Washington’s mass transit system from orange to red. All subway service, bus routes, and commuter trains were suspended until further notice.
This was only the second time any sector had gone red since they established the alert system after 9/11. There was no soft-selling it to the locals anymore.
Reports were steadily coming in that people were starting to flee the city in noticeable numbers.
The story had gone fully national, too. CNN was up on several screens around the room, covering the shootings and transit shutdown to the exclusion of everything else. They had a live helicopter shot of the rail yard, crawling with TV crews.
You could see officers from the Explosive Ordnance Division in their bulky suits, climbing in and out of the subway cars, like something right out of The Hurt Locker. It was the kind of imagery news directors love, and law enforcement hates.
I took my seat next to Javier Crist, an MPD sergeant who worked at LX1 full-time. He had the computer-assisted 911 dispatch up on one of the screens in front of him, monitoring the distress and emergency calls that were pouring in from everywhere. Our job was to gather information from the field, report it to the room, and send back a constant stream of leads for MPD to run down.
“Welcome to Camp Hell” was all Crist got out before he had to take another call.
That was the extent of my orientation. My own phone was already ringing.
I slapped on a headset and got straight to work. This wasn’t what I had been hoping for, but at least it was something. I was on the inside now.