Back Blast

62

Catherine King landed at Ben Gurion Airport after fourteen hours from Dulles through Zurich. She was tired from the flights, but as soon as she made her way through customs and pushed through the crowds to find the hired car waiting for her, she powered up her international phone and dialed a number back in the States.

It was nine a.m. in Washington, and Catherine thought Andy Shoal might be sleeping off a long night of work, but to her surprise he answered on the first ring. “Shoal.”

“Hey, Andy, it’s Cathy. I’m surprised I reached you so early. You up already?”

“Never went to bed. I spent all night in Chevy Chase trying to find new witnesses. I struck out. I got to Dupont Circle a couple hours ago and, so far at least, I’ve got nothing to show for it here, either.”

“Keep plugging away,” she said.

“How about you? Did you contact anyone while flying over?”

“I did. I exchanged e-mails with three former Mossad officers. Men I trust implicitly. They told me they know nothing about one of their assets being rescued in Trieste six years ago.”

“And you believe them.”

“I do, and that’s what makes this interesting. All three of these men, after first saying they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, came back to me a couple hours later asking where I heard about this thing in Trieste. All three conversations turned threatening. Accusatory, even. It was surreal.”

“Somebody got to them after they dug around for information.”

“That’s it exactly. Mossad knows what I’m after, and they are getting prickly. Not sure why, but it’s curious.”

“What’s your plan now?”

“I’m heading to my hotel, but I’ll call the other investigative reporters and see if they’ve got any leads on the injured Mossad officer. Maybe this guy will be a dead end, too, but I’ve come all this way.”

“Is there anything you need me to do over here?” Andy asked. Catherine could hear the hopefulness in his voice.

“You are already doing it. Keep pounding the pavement. We have to find something that makes Six’s story about what is happing in D.C. plausible. Even if I find information over here about Trieste, that doesn’t mean Six is innocent of all those murders.”

“Okay,” Andy said. “But if you need anything at all, you don’t have to bother your regular team. I’m sure they’ve got a lot to do. Give me a call and I’ll jump on it.”

“I know you will,” she said.

Andy Shoal hung up the phone and went right back to work. He told himself he was working harder than anyone else on Catherine King’s much higher-paid and much higher-regarded investigative team, and this was probably true. He’d already spent ten hours in Chevy Chase and Bethesda looking for any witnesses to the events that transpired there the previous Monday night.

Undaunted after a long night with nothing to show for it, this morning he arrived in Dupont Circle. He’d spent the last two hours — minus a twenty-minute break to step into the nearby Krispy Kreme for a breakfast of coffee and donuts — interviewing anyone who would talk to him about the event in the metro station here on Wednesday. He was looking for someone who could say they saw Max Ohlhauser before he was killed, or identify anyone else at the scene who had been part of the melee. If this mysterious Six’s story was to pan out, if it was true he did not shoot Ohlhauser or the cops, then someone in this area just might have seen other people running around with guns.

He’d met several individuals throughout the morning who had been here during the shooting. Most lived in neighboring buildings or else they were employees of the bars, restaurants, and little shops around Dupont Circle. A few people confided in him they’d seen nothing, and others greatly exaggerated their access to the events in question.

One, a bartender at a Mexican restaurant who was getting ready for the brunch crowd, had, at first, seemed like he had a real contribution to make. He claimed to have seen wounded people being hauled out of the handicap elevator, just across the street from the window in front of his bar. Andy pulled out his notebook and started asking him follow-up questions.

“The injured. How bad were they?”

“They were bad off. Covered in blood, all three of them.”

“What did they look like?”

“Like regular cops, I guess.”

Andy cocked his head. “Cops?”

“Yeah. A couple of Metro police cars pulled up, and one group of cops loaded up another from the elevator.”

At this moment, the Washington Post reporter knew this bartender was lying. No cops had been injured. All three of the Transit Police had been killed down below in the station, and Andy had been on scene before the bodies had been collected. On top of that, they had been loaded in ambulances, not squad cars.

Andy thanked the guy perfunctorily, although he wanted to punch him in the face for wasting his time, and he moved on, looking for someone who wasn’t full of shit.

By eleven a.m. he felt ready to call it off. All the Red Bull and coffee in the District couldn’t keep his mood up after so many fruitless conversations, and just the same as in Chevy Chase, the only people who had been around at the time of the event that Andy found had said they’d been standing around the police cordon filming after the shooting. He’d even watched a few examples of footage, and each time it was useless to him. Even if the recordings had been made early on, while events were still unfolding belowground, the only thing captured had been screaming and stampeding civilians and a few beat cops yelling for everyone to get the hell back.

A middle-aged Chinese sandwich maker at a chain sub shop at first didn’t seem interested in talking to Andy, but after he ordered a foot-long pastrami, she was stuck chatting with him while she prepared it.

Andy said, “A lot of people out on the street are still talking about it.”

“Yeah,” she said as she squirted mustard and mayo on his bread. “It was crazy. Everybody running every way. Somebody said there was bomb.”

Andy shook his head. “No bomb. A man with a gun.”

“Yeah. I saw some people bleeding.” She added, “I was just getting off work, walking to the Metro, when everybody started running out. I took some video, but I didn’t see nothing important.”

As she rang up his sandwich, he felt obliged to ask her what, specifically, she had recorded. “You don’t have to show me — in fact, I have to take my lunch to go — but can you just briefly describe what you saw?”

She waved her hand away dismissively. “Nothing, really. Just the police taking the wounded cops off the elevator. Putting them in the car and driving off. That’s all.”

Andy cocked his head. He didn’t think for a second that was what the woman had actually recorded, but there must have been some real confusion to the scene, considering the fact her story matched closely with what one of the other witnesses had said. “On second thought, can I take a look?”

It took the lady a minute to get her plastic gloves off and retrieve her phone from her purse in the back, and another minute to pull up the clip. She played it while holding it for Andy at first, but about thirty seconds into the video, he ripped it from her hands.

Then he said, “What the hell is this?”

It wasn’t high quality by any stretch, but the video showed enough for Andy to realize he was seeing something that no one in the local police had admitted. These were clearly wounded D.C. Metro officers, three of them being helped out of the elevator and placed into a pair of cruisers. All three men bled from their faces, and two of them were all but dragged by their colleagues. Just as they finished loading them, the elevator door opened again, and another cop staggered out and fell into the arms of his colleagues. This man looked as if he was bleeding profusely from multiple gunshot wounds. He was placed inside one of the cruisers himself, and the cars rolled off, east on Q Street NW.

Right before the video ended, the squad cars rolled right by the woman holding the cellphone that made the recording.

When it was over, Andy looked up from the phone at the Chinese sandwich artist.

“Did you show this to the police?”

She shook her head and looked down. Andy had met enough foreigners in the District to read the signals. She didn’t have papers to work legally here, so she kept her contact with authorities to a minimum.

He stopped the video and pushed it back a few seconds, then let it play again. The woman offered to sell him the entire phone for $500, but he declined, gave her a hundred bucks for her time, and e-mailed the video directly from her phone to his Washington Post e-mail account.

A minute later he was seated at a table in the restaurant, and the Chinese lady was looking at him like she thought he might try to steal her cell phone. Instead he pulled out his own phone and called a buddy in the D.C. Metro Motor Pool, an old cop who used to work out in District Seven but was rewarded with a cushy desk job for the last few years before retirement.

“What can I do for you, Andy?”

“I’m trying to find some cops, but I don’t know their names, only the numbers of their squad cars. If I give you the numbers, can you tell me who drove them on a particular shift?”

“I could tell you what police district they were assigned to and what PSA — that’s police service area. You could call somebody at that PSA and get more info. Who was behind the wheel depends on who was assigned to what unit that day. Bunch of variables.”

Andy read the number on the first cruiser to the sergeant. As soon as he finished the sergeant said, “Nah, you’re one number short.”

“No, that’s it. That’s the entire number on the cruiser.”

“Sorry, Andy. We haven’t used that number since… well, let me look it up. Since nineteen ninety-seven.”

Andy quickly read off the next number. It was six digits long.

The sergeant looked through his computer while Andy waited. “Okay. Yeah, that’s a Chevy Tahoe, over in PSA four oh three. Actually… it’s here in the motor pool for repair. It’s been here for almost a week waiting on a new oil pump.”

“You’re sure it’s not a Ford Taurus that was in Dupont Circle on Wednesday?”

“Sure as I can be, kid. Dupont is PSA two oh eight. Somehow you screwed both vehicle ID numbers up.” The sergeant laughed. “It’s all them nights, Andy. Get you some sleep, kid.”

“Will do. Thanks.” Andy hung up the phone and slipped it back into his pocket, certain now that he was sitting on the biggest story in America.

Fake cops involved in a shoot-out in the middle of Washington, D.C.

While Tel Aviv would be Catherine’s ground zero for getting to the mystery of the story about Six, Andy’s ground zero was right here, just a mile away from the Washington Post’s headquarters.

“Oh my God,” he said to himself, but he knew there was much about this he didn’t understand. He worried that if he called Catherine King right now with what he knew, she’d just pass on his information to her investigative reporters. In fact, he was certain of it.

No, Andy told himself. He’d dig into this even deeper, connect the dots, and only go to King when he had done the investigative reporting himself.

He looked up at the woman behind the counter. “Do you guys sell coffee?”