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Senior Agent Sam Nunn’s morning sucked. He had barely slept in the three days since the attack. The near-continuous flow of coffee and fast food had turned his stomach sour and he had no time for the high impact exercise he depended on to manage his stressful job. Worst of all, he could not offer his superiors a solid lead from his slice of the FBI’s five-prong investigation.
Nunn’s team was charged with checking out surveillance cameras near the crime scene. Another team was doing interviews, including those with families and friends of the victims on the off chance the attack was extreme retaliation against a single target.
A third team was looking for – and pouring over – physical evidence. The search was ever-broadening from the Russian Embassy and National Cathedral as little of value was found. Evidence from the cathedral – the ladder propped outside the administrative offices, the flexible cuffs and leash used to secure Nadia, shell casings near the dead security officer, the ballistic report on the slugs in his body – would be valuable at trial, but probably of little value in tracking a killer. Employees who saw Nadia walk through with the workman offered conflicting descriptions. The cougar Doreen couldn’t remember much about his face. A distraught Nadia was of even less help. And Cathedral visitors had arrived before law enforcement, smudging any fingerprints that might have been left.
The fourth team was conducting needle-in-a-haystack searches, throwing up random roadblocks, checking IDs in airports and bus stations, all done without a clue to what they were looking for. Already, the futile checks were winding down. The final team was chasing tips pouring in from around the country. Someone acting suspiciously, someone who might be a radical Muslim, someone who had threatened the president or someone in his administration, someone this, someone that. Most callers were sincere, some vindictive, others just plain kooks or fools. Still, there was always hope that a useful call would come in.
The investigation and manhunt centered on Washington, of course, where several thousand officers from every level and branch of law enforcement were mobilized. But around the country, thousands more officers followed up on tips in their home jurisdictions. Then there were players on the periphery: Communication specialists trying to both inform and calm a frightened populace. Techies searching the Internet, flight and railroad manifests, social media postings for any helpful lead. Law enforcement liaison officers reaching out to public officials and Congress, where some lawmakers showed leadership and others scrambled for political advantage.
Nunn was dismayed to learn that the cathedral’s surveillance cameras were shut down the week of the attack, for an upgrade no less. That meant having to rely on other surveillance cameras in the area, private as well as police. There were a lot, and locating them all posed a challenge. Nunn ordered more than two dozen teams of four agents each to begin the tedious work of locating cameras within a mile of the embassy and the cathedral. Quickly contacting camera owners and operators was crucial to prevent time-sensitive images from being automatically erased. Already, images were being reviewed, but so far, nothing fruitful had appeared.
There was a knock, just barely, before Agent Mike Burk walked in to make Nunn’s day: “Morning, senator.”
Nunn answered with a scowl, wondering yet again when his favorite agent would tire of referencing his namesake, a former senator from Georgia. As usual, Burk’s teasing came with a broad smile.
“What are you so damn happy about? Haven’t I been working you hard enough?”
“We’ve got a partial license plate, a number one followed by a three that just might be bad news for these assholes.”
“We’ve got thousands of license plate numbers, full and partial.”
“But this one,” Burk said, “comes with a guy putting a case of some sort or maybe a backpack in the trunk of a sedan parked within a couple blocks of National Cathedral. And get this, it was shot within five minutes or so of everything going down there. Unfortunately, you can’t really see the guy. The surveillance camera is one of the rotating kind. It was at a construction site about half a block away and the camera caught only a piece of this guy from the left rear. We’re trying to blow up the best photos, to see if it’s a backpack that Nadia what’s her name can identify.”
“At least it’s something to run with.”
“The car appears to have a Maryland plate. We’ll likely get the make and model soon and can start checking out cars with a plate ending with one and three. But I’ll bet the plate is stolen so we’ve asked our Maryland brethren to run down any plates like that that were stolen in the last month.”
“Good work, Mike.”
“You’re welcome ...Sam.”
“What about the embassy’s cameras? Maybe they can tell us why that old man and the cop were killed. Ballistics show they were shot by the same gun. But why?”
“I think the guy who shot them was calling in the RPGs. Somehow the old man and the cop got in the middle of that.”
“He? Why not she?” Nunn flashed an exaggerated grin.
“Don’t go all feminist on me, boss. Okay, he or she was spotting for the he or she firing the rocket launcher. That’s why the second and third shots were better than the first. As to your first question, as usual the Ruskies aren’t exactly forthcoming about what they’ve got, if anything. I’m sure we’ll hear from them when it’s in their best interest.”
“The big boss is wondering if we have a line on who’s responsible. He doesn’t like my answer, but I can’t make up suspects. Have you stumbled across anything you haven’t told me?”
“Nope. As far as I know, none of the usual suspects has stepped up, not even ISIS. Usually they can’t claim responsibility fast enough.”
“What’s your best hunch?”
Burk shook his head. “Pure speculation. My gut says it’s not domestic. If I’m wrong though, I’d say disgruntled ex-military. Those were pretty tough shots. I’d guess the shooter is foreign, trained in the Mideast writ large, somehow got by immigration.”
“I don’t know if the shooter was good or just lucky. But even if he got help from a spotter on shots two and three, you have to give him full credit for the first shot. Anyway, none of this gets us anywhere.”
“Right, boss.”
“And Agent Burk, caution your colleagues to stick with facts in their reports. If speculation, particularly about foreign involvement, reaches the president, he’ll tell the world as if it’s gospel.”
“Tweet, tweet.”
––––––––
Helpful reports were coming in by early afternoon. The car caught by surveillance camera near the cathedral was a 2010 Toyota Camry. Eleven of that make, year and model were currently licensed with plates ending in one and three. Local police were enlisted to find owners of the Camrys as quickly and quietly as possible. The order was to locate but not to approach or alert. As the car owners were located, federal officers, backed up by SWAT teams, were dispatched to conduct interviews. By nightfall, six of the owners were cleared. Only one had not been located, a woman on a two-week vacation in Europe – virtually as good as an alibi.
Just one set of Maryland plates ending in one and three had been stolen in the past month. Those plates were taken from a 2012 Chevy Volt, parked in a corner of the Montgomery County Public Library lot in downtown Bethesda. Burk telephoned First Eye, Inc., the library’s contract surveillance company. A woman answered and confirmed the video was intact. “But just barely, honey. Two more days and you would have seen nothing but black.” He got an address and said he’d be right out.
Agent Fay Welling, whose demeanor was as sour as Burk’s was engaging, sullenly agreed to go with him. They were soon pulling up at the Georgia Avenue address of First Eye in the suburb of Silver Spring. “This way, honey,” said the woman Burk had talked with minutes earlier. “I’ve got you set up in the conference room.”
Burk and Welling settled into arm chairs and watched as the camera swept a portion of the library parking lot, then caught a shadowy form squatting at the back of a car. “That could be a Volt,” said Burk. A white rectangular shape was at the person’s feet. “Probably got the front plate first.” The camera’s focus moved away, leaving them to guess the thief was male but not giving them enough detail to be sure, let alone a description. Disappointment, and then just briefly, the camera caught the left front of another car – and another partial plate, barely legible in the dim street light.
“This was taken a little after one in the morning,” Welling noted. “Pretty risky for a set of plates, given how well Bethesda is patrolled.”
“If he’s good with tools he’s going to be exposed two minutes, maybe less,” Burk answered. “Apparently a risk he was ready to take.”
Within minutes the partial plate search had resumed. Three possibilities were soon identified. One was near Point of Rocks.
––––––––
Burk was back in Nunn’s office, calling him senator. Back with a big grin. Being ignored.
“So what you got?”
“Report from the Ruskies.”
“And?”
“It’s good. Embassy cameras got images of a guy across the street. They show him shooting the D.C. cop and the old man, and he’s talking on a phone. Our lip readers say he’s saying things that seem consistent with giving directions to a shooter. We don’t have sound yet. There was too much traffic noise to pull specific words out, but we’re working on it. I think one reason the Russians decided to play ball is they need help with the audio, with that and getting out a description.
“We think he’s white, lean, average height or a little more, wearing a tan trench coat and fedora, probably a shade of gray or brown. He’s wearing sunglasses and has a beard, though we’re trying to get a good close up. It could be fake. There’s good reason to think he’s in disguise. He walked with a limp before the attack and seemed to forget about it afterward.”
Nunn was pleased with the lip readers: “Damn, I said ‘Not a go’.” And “One notch up. One notch left.” That fit where the second and third RPGs landed in relation to the first. “You’re good” could mean cease fire, given no more grenades came in. It was easy to confirm the old man served in World War II, including theaters where artillery was used. One “Damn you” could be read, and that sounded like a proud vet. The meaning of his shouts, “He did this” seemed obvious.
Other cameras glimpsed the man in the trench coat as he made his way up Wisconsin through curious pedestrians rapidly filling the sidewalk. Then, a man in a trench coat and fedora is captured by the grimy lens of a camera near Macomb Street, but the man is clean-shaven. He gets in a sedan similar to one caught by the surveillance camera at the construction site north of the cathedral, where a man in work clothes and baseball cap had put a case, or maybe a backpack, in the car’s trunk.
“That, of course, could be the RPG launcher,” said Burk. He shifted gears, telling Nunn about the surveillance camera capturing the license plate theft in the library parking lot.
“Just how good are these guys?” Nunn wondered. “The spotter forgets his limp and seems to have used a third-rate disguise. If they knew their way around, they wouldn’t have risked getting caught stealing plates in a damn parking lot. There are easier ways.”
“That exposes you to other people.”
“It does ...On the other hand they’re good enough to pull off a high-risk assault, not your garden variety high-risk assault but a major terrorist assault. There was plenty for two people to do in the cathedral but they’re gutsy enough to split up so the shooter would have a spotter. And they’re ruthless. The security guard may have put up a fight, but the old vet? He didn’t have to be killed ...And then they just disappear, unless your partial plate works out.”
“So Dr. Partial Plate, where are you coming down?”
“I don’t know. What I’m afraid of, Burk, is that these guys are just starting to cut their teeth. No pun intended.”