DHS–Domestic Terrorism
Annex
Washington, DC
February 13, 2018
Meg had been out for two days. Dan found it very odd that she hadn’t even called. There were lots of people out with the flu that was going around, but it just wasn’t like Meg to not call in or leave him a message. There had been no email from her. That was unusual too. Meg usually spent a few hours on the weekend catching up on the team’s progress and frequently sent out follow-ups and reminders. She copied him on all the key items that they were tracking. Dan relied on her to keep the routine progress reports flowing and make sure that all the moving parts of the Task Force were integrated.
Where could she be? He wondered aloud. Nearly 11:00 a.m. and not a peep. His desk phone rang angrily. Maybe this call would answer his question.
“Good morning, Dan Steele,” he answered.
“Mr. Steele, this is Doris at reception down on the first floor. There are a couple of FBI agents here to see you.”
“OK, thanks, Doris,” he replied, “I’ll be right down.” This happened frequently on the Special Task Force. He routinely met with reps from multiple agencies and never dismissed a data point, even if it initially seemed inconsequential. Yet the timing of this call alarmed him. He worried that Meg might be in trouble. Seal Platoon missions had taught him valuable lessons in developing situational awareness from all available sources even if the dots later proved to be outliers. He passed through the security turnstile and approached the two agents in the lobby. Both looked like they came from central casting, a Laurel and Hardy pair.
“You Dan Steele?” asked the beefy one with the high and tight military haircut and traces of a donut’s confectioner’s sugar creating snowflakes on his suit.
“Yes, that’s me,” said Dan evenly. He didn’t understand why but he immediately felt defensive and his autonomic flight or fight adrenaline kicked in.
Everything quickly became a blur as he was handcuffed and unceremoniously led out of the building and into a waiting black sedan with tinted windows. The two agents remained incommunicado during the trip over to the FBI Headquarters building that was just two blocks from the DHS Annex. They drove into an underground garage that opened with a key card that Hardy waved past a sensor at the entrance.
Dan endured a brief “in-processing” where he surrendered his wallet, cell phone, car keys and DHS badge before being escorted into an interrogation room. It reminded him of the US Navy’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) school that he’d attended in the mountains of Maine. Only there the instructors were decked out in Eastern European uniforms, and the students knew that the course restricted physical abuse to provocation and verbal attacks. That had been a cake walk compared to his BUDS training. He wondered who might be observing from the other side of the large window covering the wall opposite his chair.
One of the agents slid a photo across the table and asked Dan if he recognized the woman.
“Sure, that’s Meg Andrews. She’s on a team I’m leading in DHS.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last Friday afternoon. She left the DHS office about 6:00 p.m. to go home. I had a couple of follow-up emails from her on Saturday morning and expected her back here in DC bright and early Monday morning.”
“You married Mr. Steele?”
“Yes…well no.” Dan stammered, “I lost my wife in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel collapse last summer, so I’m not married any longer.”
“What is your relationship with Ms. Andrews?”
“She was the Bureau rep assigned to my team at DHS looking at domestic terrorism. I first met her down in Quantico last fall. What’s this all about anyway?”
“Were you involved with Ms. Andrews?” the beefy agent leered.
“No.” Dan felt anger coursing through his body and decided that he needed to take a different tack. “Again, I’d like to know what this is about,” he said, challenging the pair for an answer.
The beefy agent annoyed him again by responding, “We’ll ask the questions. You are here to answer them.”
Dan stood up, now in full anger as one of the agents drew a Taser and pointed it at his chest.
“Ever been incapacitated by one of these before? I don’t think you’d like it much. Now, sit down.”
He took his seat as the other agent sat across from him and started the standard good cop, bad cop routine.
“Listen, Mr. Steele, you are in some deep kimchi. Meg Andrews’ body was delivered to our office in Quantico this morning in a large black trash bag. She’d been tortured by someone who knew how to get answers, raped and suffocated. We found her green eyeballs in a jar in your apartment this morning along with a bloody T-shirt that’s been sent to the lab. Looks to me as if you are one sick puppy. And we here at the Bureau don’t like to lose one of our own. Now, you can make this easy or you can make it hard, but one thing’s for sure. You are going to tell us what happened.”
Dumbfounded after hearing about Meg, he looked up with a mask of fury, stared at the pair and declared angrily, “Look, I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’ve been set up.”
“Where were you over the past four days?”
“Friday night I stayed at the office until about 9:00 p.m. Saturday, I got up and took a long run in the city, down to the Navy Yard and back. Saturday afternoon, I drove to Virginia Beach to check on our house and had dinner with my previous Commanding Officer at a restaurant downtown. I ended up spending the night there and drove back here Sunday afternoon. Went into the office late in the afternoon, ran through my email and got ready for the week. In the office by 07:00 a.m. Monday morning and left about twelve hours later. Played racquetball at the Athletic Club over in the Pentagon until 9:30 p.m. and was in bed an hour later. Got to the office this morning at 06:30 a.m. and pushed paper until my unexpected visit from the two of you. Again, you guys should be spending your time talking to someone else.”
The heavy agent with the dusting of confectioner’s sugar on his ill-fitting suit put both fists on the table and leaned over so that Dan could smell last night’s beer on his breath.
“As I said before, we ask the questions, you give us the answers, and we’re not interested in any additional commentary, got it?”
“OK, I’m tired of this exchange,” said Dan, “I think that I want to make a telephone call, now.”
He stood and Laurel reached for his hardware. Still handcuffed, Dan quickly outmaneuvered him and locked his wrist behind his back. He ordered Hardy to place the Taser on the table. The other agent looked stunned, a deer in the headlights.
He leaned over the man’s shoulder and calmly said, “I would appreciate your permitting me to make a call. Otherwise, I might get difficult to deal with. You understand?”
Dan released his hold and then faced both agents, his eyes wide and smoldering with anger. “As I said, I had nothing to do with this. I can make a call and you guys can probably hold me on suspicion but that’s not going to help us find out who did this and why. So, how do you want to proceed, the hard way or the easy way?”
Before either Agent had a chance to respond, a speaker crackled from the ceiling, “Sorry for the confusion, Mr. Steele. You are free to go. Agent Conrad will drive you back to your office.”
Back at headquarters, Dan headed for Sandy Matthews’ office and barged through the door. Sandy listened to the story and became apoplectic by the end. “I can’t believe this. What the hell were those guys thinking?”
“I don’t know. But what I’m really concerned about is that the bad guys know that we are on to something, and they will stop at nothing to disrupt it, including killing those on the Task Force. They’ve raised the bidding, and we need to meet them head-on. I’m not ready to tell you how, but I know that we need to change the game. We can’t win a war of attrition against an enemy we don’t know. Can you ask our physical security team to review the tapes from the last month to see if they’ve got anything that looks like surveillance on the building?”