WASHINGTON, D.C.
It was too late.
By the time Ana Thorne saw the man in the ski mask swinging onto her balcony from above, she had no time to react. The man hit her square in the stomach with both feet, and she flew backward into an unforgiving cement wall. The powerful blow knocked the wind out of her and left her momentarily disoriented and gasping for breath. Within seconds the man had regained his footing and was now aiming his pistol directly at her forehead. Ana could tell from the look in his eyes that he wasn’t interested in talking. He was going to kill her.
A gunshot suddenly exploded, and Ana instinctively closed her eyes. Yet she felt no pain. She opened her eyes a moment later and found, to her amazement, that the man had missed. Without hesitation, she raised her own weapon. But as she did, she noticed something odd about the masked gunman. He was lowering his pistol and stumbling toward her. Then, all at once, he collapsed face-first onto the balcony floor with a loud thud.
Ana now understood. The man hadn’t missed at all. He’d been shot in the back. Frantically, she scanned the sanctuary for the source of the bullet, fearing that another one might be heading her way. She immediately spotted a man in the balcony across from her, barely visible within the deep shadows of the church. He had a gun.
A man’s voice suddenly buzzed in her ear. “You’re welcome,” said Mike Califano.
Ana looked again and saw that the man in the opposite balcony was waving to her. Unbelievable. She shook her head in amazement. Then, as much as she tried to suppress it, she smiled. “That was a damn good shot,” she whispered into her concealed microphone. If Califano responded at all, she never heard it. Because, at that very moment, all hell broke loose in the sanctuary below.
“Move in now!” yelled Vladamir Krupnov into his small walkie-talkie. From his vantage point in the rear upper balcony, he watched as five of his Ukrainian goons burst into the sanctuary from all directions. All of these men were wearing tracksuits and black ski masks, and carrying compact Uzi machine guns.
The man and the woman behind the pulpit were already on the move, having heard the commotion in the balcony a few seconds earlier. “This way,” said the elderly woman in white. She and Malachi darted to an adjacent doorway and quickly disappeared.
Krupnov grimaced as he watched the pair disappearing through the doorway. Malachi must not escape! He was just about to bark another order into his walkie-talkie when a sound-suppressed gunshot suddenly punctured the air to his right. In the same instant, he saw one of his men in the sanctuary stumble and hit the floor.
Goddamnit! Krupnov seethed. He immediately spotted the source of the gunshot. It was a blond woman in the side balcony to his right. And she was preparing to fire again. Before she could, Krupnov hoisted his Uzi and unleashed a firestorm of bullets in her direction. “Chertovsky suka!” he screamed. Fucking bitch! The woman in the balcony immediately went down and disappeared from view.
“You all right?” whispered Mike Califano into his microphone after the machine-gun fire had subsided. He was crouching low behind the wall of his own balcony.
No response.
Shit. Still ducking low, Califano scrambled to the balcony doorway and burst out into the landing outside. With his pistol raised, he quickly scanned the darkened stairs in both directions. It appeared to be clear. “Ana, you okay?” he repeated into his microphone, louder this time. Seconds ticked by with no response.
Finally, the voice of Ana Thorne crackled in his ear. “I’m fine,” she said in a strained voice.
“You hit?”
“No. Just got the wind knocked out of me.”
Califano breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God. He tapped his transmit button again. “They went through a door at the front of the sanctuary. Right side if you’re facing the pulpit.”
“Got it,” said Ana. “Bill, can you help us out with the layout of this place?”
Bill McCreary’s voice came on the line a second later. “Oh, so you can hear me,” he said in an exasperated tone.
“Yeah, Bill. We can hear you,” whispered Ana. “It’s been a little busy here, okay? How about that layout?”
Back at CIA headquarters, McCreary was still pulling up the original architectural drawings of the iconic church on his computer screen. “Give me a second.”
“We don’t have a second,” Ana whispered emphatically.
As luck would have it, the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, at Sixteenth and K, had been the subject of a lengthy and contentious legal battle concerning its status as a historic landmark. The owners of the church and the congregation itself wanted the structure torn down and replaced with something more “churchlike.” The District of Columbia, however, insisted that the building was historical and wanted it preserved as an exemplar of the short-lived Brutalist movement in the city. To the surprise of nobody, the district won. As a result of this legal skirmish, the building’s exterior and interior designs were now well documented and permanently preserved.
Strange that the government would want to preserve such an eyesore, McCreary thought as he finally got the right architectural drawing on his screen. “Okay,” he said over the secure radio network. “The door to the right of the pulpit, as you’re facing it, leads to a small vestibule, about eight by twelve feet. On the other side of that, through a doorway, is a midlevel landing with two sets of stairs. One set leads down to a hallway that connects to the front lobby on the east side of the building, where you guys probably came in. The other set leads up to the back of the sanctuary.”
“How many exits are there?” asked Califano.
“Uh . . . three. The main entrance is on the east side. There’s a delivery entrance on the I Street side, and a fire exit on the west side, which goes into that alley where Ana was earlier.”
Where I almost got killed, Ana thought.
“Those dudes are gonna have all those exits covered,” said Califano.
“Yeah,” said Ana. “But I think that old lady knows another way out.”
“What makes you so sure?” asked Califano.
“Woman’s intuition.” As Ana spoke, she slipped carefully through the door of her balcony and quickly scanned the stairs in both directions. There were stairs going up to her right, which angled clockwise and disappeared. And there were stairs going down to her left, angling counterclockwise toward the lobby. “Jesus,” she whispered into her microphone. “This place reminds me of one of those crazy Escher drawings.”
“I know,” said Califano. “Stairs everywhere.”
“Okay, here’s the plan,” whispered Ana. “Mike, you head upstairs toward the back of the sanctuary. Be careful, though. The shooter may still be up there. I’ll head downstairs to the lobby. I think I know where they’re heading.”
“On my way,” said Califano.
“Be careful, guys,” McCreary said nervously.
“Where are we going?” whispered Malachi.
“This way,” urged the elderly woman in white who called herself Opal. She was moving surprisingly fast for a woman her age. With Malachi in tow, she headed straight upstairs, banked right into a hallway, then walked quickly toward the main lobby. As she neared the lobby, she spotted a man in a black ski mask about thirty feet away, patrolling the front door with a machine gun. Apparently, he had not seen them yet. She took two more careful steps in that direction, then quickly darted left into a darkened doorway. Malachi followed her through the doorway and disappeared.
Mike Califano climbed the angular stairs toward the back of the church. With each forty-five-degree turn of the stairwell, the shadows and indirect lighting shifted dramatically, creating a bewildering “fun house” effect. As he ascended these steps, a troubling thought began easing into his brain. Why am I heading up?
Califano stopped in his tracks. To hell with woman’s intuition. He had his own intuition, namely that nobody trying to escape a building ever runs up. Without a second thought, he reversed direction and began descending the stairs. Fuck protocol.
“Keep going,” said the elderly woman in white. “It’s a long way down.” Malachi nodded and continued descending the narrow cement stairs in the dank stairwell, which was dimly lit with incandescent bulbs at each landing. Opal followed close behind him.
“What is this place?” Malachi asked over his shoulder.
“It’s a parking garage.”
Malachi paused at the landing for level 2. “Keep going?”
“Yes,” said Opal. “Down one more.”
Fifteen seconds later, they exited into a vacant parking deck, forty feet below the octagonal church. The space was sparsely lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs, several of which were flickering badly. The cavernous parking deck was entirely empty and eerily quiet, like a tomb.
“Shhh,” said Opal. “Did you hear that?”
Malachi nodded. He could hear faint footsteps in the stairwell behind them. He quickly pulled his pistol from his coat pocket.
Opal eyed the weapon disapprovingly and shook her head. “Violence is not the answer, Daniel.”
Malachi stared blankly, unsure of how to respond.
“If it comes to that, your weapon will be useless anyway. Put it away.”
Malachi reluctantly complied.
“This way,” said Opal, motioning emphatically toward a metal door nearby, which was prominently marked with the yellow-and-black symbol for a fallout shelter—three yellow triangles embedded in a black circle. She quickly made her way to the door and punched an access code into a small keypad on the wall next to it. The metal door immediately clicked open and the two of them slipped through and entered a dark stairwell. “Leave the door open so we can see,” she said. Then she carefully led Malachi down one more flight of stairs, around a corner, and into a wide, nearly pitch-black space.
Malachi strained to see into the darkness. The flickering fluorescent lighting that bled through the open doorway provided just enough illumination that he could tell there were concrete walls and a concrete floor. He could also make out the shapes of desks and consoles and other structures clustered together in groups, extending far into the darkness. “What is this place?” he whispered.
Opal paused. “This is the reason the government won’t let the congregation build a new church on this site. Until about twelve years ago, this was the official nuclear fallout shelter for the White House. There’s a passageway on the other side that connects directly to the basement of the west wing. Or at least there used to be. It’s sealed shut now.”
“But . . . how do you have access?”
The woman laughed softly. “Honey, I designed this place.”
“Hey, boss?” said Steve Goodwin, who was seated at his computer in the DTAI workroom at the CIA.
“Yeah?” said McCreary.
“Did you say there were three exits in that building?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I just got another translation from our language people. Looks like those Ukrainians are covering four exits.”
“Huh?” McCreary’s heart skipped a beat as he looked up from his computer terminal. “Where’s the fourth exit?”
Goodwin carefully studied the translation on the screen. “Uh . . . it’s the service entrance at the back of the Hay-Adams hotel at Sixteenth and H.”
“What the—” McCreary immediately swiveled in his chair and began typing furiously on his keyboard. Two minutes later, his screen was full of top-secret information about the fallout shelter beneath the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, and the secret passageway that ran deep beneath Sixteenth Street, connecting the White House to the Brutalist octagonal church, with an intermediate escape point behind the Hay-Adams hotel. “I can’t believe I missed this,” he said, shaking his head. He quickly pressed transmit on his microphone. “Ana? Mike?”
No response.
“If you guys can hear me, there’s a tunnel beneath the church that runs along Sixteenth Street toward the White House. There’s an access point behind the Hay-Adams. And somehow these Ukrainian guys know all about it.”