Homeland Terror

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“I don’t have all the details yet,” VanderMeer confessed, “but apparently BATF showed up along with some other Feds. Our people were stopped cold, and from what I’ve heard, it was pretty ugly. One of the trucks was blown up, so the place is crawling with media and lookie-loos.”

“Shit,” Walden murmured. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was one of the few investigatory agencies he hadn’t yet managed to infiltrate with his own people.

“Who were these other Feds?” Walden said as he made his way to the wet bar and poured himself a drink.

“I think they were from Justice,” VanderMeer said. “Special agents.”

“Figures.”

Walden had used his connections to try to find out who’d blown up the weapons cache at the Wildest Dreams Fantasy Camp but had run into a dead end once the trail led to the Justice Department. It turned out that there were some levels of confidentiality even he could not bypass. And now it looked as if the same operative who’d brought down Jason Cummings and Mitch Brower had played a hand in thwarting the AFM’s attempt to replace the arms that had gone up in smoke back in Sykesville. Not knowing who he was up against left Walden feeling vulnerable. But, as with the incident at Wildest Dreams, his foremost concern was that he remain above suspicion.

“Did they take anyone into custody?” the senator asked.

“I don’t think so,” VanderMeer reported. “I think everyone was killed.”

Walden drained his drink and quickly poured another as he assessed the situation. He’d been lucky in the case of Sykesville, since neither Louie Paxton nor Xavier Manuel had known anything about the weapons stolen from Aberdeen, much less Walden’s role in enabling the theft. Both men had protected VanderMeer’s identity, as well, but he knew there was a chance their tongues could be loosened in the interrogation room. In Georgetown, at least, it appeared there were no survivors capable of ratting him out. Some consolation, he thought to himself.

“There’d better not be a trail leading back to us,” he warned.

“We should be okay,” VanderMeer assured him. “I’m on my way to the compound as we speak. I’ll make sure our tracks are covered.”

“Good. Once that’s settled, we need to come up with a way to spin this whole mess in our favor,” Walden advised. Already his mind was sorting through options. Making snap decisions while under duress was a skill he’d mastered over the years; it had helped him immeasurably in his rise through the ranks on Capitol Hill.

“Greg, listen to me,” VanderMeer said. “Bad as the news from Georgetown is, I’m afraid that’s not the worst of it. It’s not the reason I called.”

“What?” Walden was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

There was a pause on the line, then Joan VanderMeer dropped the bombshell.

“It has to do with Edgar Byrnes,” she said. “You remember him. He’s the older brother of Wallace and Harlan—”

“I know who he is,” Walden interrupted. “We’ve got him planted at that goddamn farm next to Langley with that rocket launcher from Aberdeen. Once we get all our pieces in place, he’ll—”

“He’s not at the farm anymore,” VanderMeer interrupted. “Apparently he snapped tonight.”

“Snapped? What do you mean? He offed himself?”

“Worse,” she said. “He went ahead with the plan. On his own.”

Walden let out a deep breath and sank into chair behind him. This couldn’t be happening. “He fired at Langley?”

“Afraid so. Last I heard, there are eight confirmed dead. They’re still fighting the fire.”

Walden finished his drink, then hurled the shot glass across the room, shattering it against the flagstone hearth. He already had his hands full trying to figure out a way to put a spin on Sykesville and the gun-show fiasco in Georgetown. Now this.

“Please tell me he put a bullet through his head afterward,” he muttered into the cell phone. “Please tell me he’s in no position to talk.”

Once again, there was a moment’s silence on the line. Then VanderMeer warily confirmed Walden’s worst fears.

“I’m sorry, Greg, but he’s still out there somewhere.”

5

Washington, D.C.

News of the attack on CIA headquarters reached Mack Bolan while he was speaking with D.C. Homicide Detective Bill Darwin in the ER waiting room at Georgetown University Hospital. They were less than a mile from where EMTs had first begun emergency treatment on John Kissinger after arriving at the blood-drenched battleground where the armorer had gone down. A surgical team was working on Kissinger in the OR, trying to pinpoint the source of his internal bleeding. X-rays had already determined that the man had sustained a concussion, as well as four broken ribs and a punctured lung, all courtesy of the fallen sign. For the moment at least, his condition was listed as critical.

When he heard about the rocket attack, Bolan’s first reaction was the same as that of Darwin, a twelve-year veteran of the Washington, D.C. police force. Both men were convinced there had to be a connection with the aborted heist in Georgetown.

“Makes sense,” Darwin said after Bolan had voiced his theory. “I mean, we know the guys here were part of this militia outfit. Going after federal buildings is just the kind of stunt they’d pull.”

“I wonder about the timing,” Bolan said. “CIA got hit right after we shut down the heist.”

Darwin checked his notes. “Yeah. Less than five minutes apart. You think whoever fired that rocket was retaliating for what happened here?”

“Could be,” Bolan replied. A part of him, however, couldn’t help wondering if the attack might have been more in response to what had gone down at the fantasy camp in Sykesville. True, the CIA hadn’t played a role in Bolan’s mission there, but he knew the militia fringe tended to see the federal government as some unified force when it came to encroaching on their rights. As such, it wouldn’t be unlike them to strike out indiscriminately looking to avenge the deaths of Jason Cummings and Mitch Brower. Bolan had already caught wind of some Web site eulogies in which the fantasy camp founders had been declared martyrs killed by the Feds because of Brower’s recent editorial campaign against calls for a national identity card.