Cloudburst

PROLOGUE COMES A STORM

The calf-high, black leather boots hit the carpet with a muffled thud.

His features were dark, both hair and skin, and in the darkened room his form was specter-like. His eyes surveyed the area. It was devoid of life, as he knew it would be. To his left the slender beams of morning light which pierced the adjustable window shades were glinting off the polished table tops.

A few words were said to his comrade and then the equipment was passed down, followed by the second man, shorter than his partner. The tall one gathered his things and went to the window, carefully parting the thin metal blinds to scan the area below. The other moved to the center of the room. He put the satchel at his feet and looked up.

The first movement was visible on the street sixty feet below. The tall one let the blinds close with a metallic snap. “It is time.”

The shorter man simply nodded and pulled the loading lever back on his rifle, chambering the first round. Next, he picked up the green tube and extended the two sections. Finally, he said a silent prayer and prepared to ready the last weapon, waiting for the final word from his brother.

After a quarter century of service in the Bureau, Art Jefferson had learned to stay out of the way when the president came to town. If he had to serve as FBI liaison, the best place for him was away from the action, yet close enough to be found if any Secret Service type needed a Bureau man to answer a question. The quiet, shady spot on the north side of the pricey hotel was as far away as he could realistically be, yet it provided what he needed most at the moment: relief from the ninety-five-degree weather, which hadn’t abated in daytime for a week. A few steps behind, inside the Los Angeles Hilton, it was comfortably air-conditioned. But it was also teeming with bureaucratic bodyguards carrying Uzis in black briefcases and wearing tiny earphones at the ends of coiled wires that disappeared beneath their collars.

Art instinctively reached into his side jacket pocket, but the cigarettes weren’t there.

“Shit.” He hated the idea that he had to go without something. It wasn’t in him to admit to mortal frailties like high blood pressure and reduced lung capacity. The doctors — three of them — had told him to drop fifteen pounds and kick the habit, or he might end up like a lot of black men pushing fifty…lying in his backyard next to the lawn mower and clutching his chest. What the hell do they know? he thought.

The sun was just about to peak over the baby skyscraper to Art’s right. Even in the building-shaded downtown area the heat was already oppressive in the late morning, and the direct sunlight soon to come would only add to the discomfort. At least Art could be grateful that the hubbub of activity that always accompanied a presidential visit brought with it the disappearance of the normal Sunday traffic. It would have been light for the weekend, but that was a relative term. Light only in comparison to the weekday lines of cars on Wilshire Boulevard, a thoroughfare on the Hilton’s north side that stretched west a number of miles to the beaches of Santa Monica, but east for only another three blocks to its end at the base of the One Wilshire Building. The cars filling the street with noise and exhaust fumes on a normal day of rest would have been, at the least, annoying. On a weekday…

Art left his leaning post, one of the covered drive’s pillars, making sure to put on his mirrored sunglasses. He also nonchalantly ran his right hand up the side of his jacket. It was there. He knew it would be, but checking was a habit developed from a single incident, many years before, that had almost cost him his life. The feel of his gun was reassuring. If he never had to use it again, that was fine; if he did, he was damn sure going to be certain it was there. It was a compulsion, one he was joked about—Stroked Mr. Smith and Wesson today? — but so what?

Across Wilshire sat the Secret Service war wagons, identical black Chevy Suburbans, their windows tinted to the point of reflectiveness. In each were five armed-to-the-teeth Service agents, the Counter Assault Teams, who would respond to any call for assistance from the presidential detail leader with authorization to fire as needed to protect the chief executive. The CAT agents would just as eagerly empty their automatics into any perceived threat as they would place themselves between harm and the ‘man.’

Good work by the Secret Service and other agencies had prevented the need for using force to protect the president in the past ten years, but they knew their luck could not hold out. Terrorism had come to the States long ago, though to some it was seen only as a more violent criminal element exposing itself. The truth was more frightening. Violence was not the greatest weapon of the terrorist: Intelligence was. Brains multiplied the effect of bullets by a factor of ten. It was only a matter of time before the Service adage ‘Innocents be damned, save the man’ came to be.

Art rolled up a stick of Big Red, his cigarette surrogate, and pushed it into his mouth, getting an immediate taste of the hot cinnamon flavor. Standing curbside he looked east, to his right. Every building in the vicinity of Seventh and Figueroa, the intersection nearest where the president would exit the hotel, would have a Secret Service counter-sniper team atop or in the structure, some two. Each pair, distinctive in their mottled gray-black-white urban cammies, was a true team: one spotter with his own M-16A2 assault rifle, and one long-rifleman, master of the PSG-1, a highly accurate and hideously expensive German-made .308 sniping weapon. These teams had an extraordinary degree of latitude when it came to ‘fire or forget it’ situations, even more so than the immediate presidential detail, to the point that they alone made the decision to drop a threat. There was no waiting for the proverbial green light as in SWAT-style operations. They did not take the awesome responsibilities of their job lightly. They would do what had to be done, and God be with the bad guy on the wrong side of the cross hairs.

Art strolled easily, his hands in his pockets. His FBI shield, clipped to his black belt, was the only official ID he needed, being a ranking and easily recognizable special agent of the Bureau’s L.A. field office. His specialty was OC, organized crime investigations, an area he had worked mostly in for fifteen years, and exclusively in for the last ten in the City of Angels. In rank he was fourth in L.A., under Lou Hidalgo, Jerry Donovan, and Special Agent in Charge William Kileen. Art liked to think that the Irish blood at the top was a sign of luck, at least for himself and his fellow agents, but he also knew there was a long tradition of Irishmen in the Bureau, dating back to its beginning. There was an abundance of the people from across the sea back then, almost all sturdy, patriotic individuals who took to their new home quite well. Art’s ancestors had had no such luck in the early 1900s. Just avoiding the lynch mobs his grandmother had told him about seemed to have occupied much of their time in Alabama. He didn’t put much stock in the belief that something was owed the black man, though, instead believing that one’s true grit could be measured by exploiting his own abilities. Some called it pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Art called it having balls…and using them.

He stopped at the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa, the northeast corner of the Hilton’s block-square complex. There were a number of uniformed officers of the Los Angeles Police Department standing at several points in the intersection, some near the open-doored squad cars that blocked the streets for two blocks in all directions. Art could see, south on Figueroa, the more heavily guarded area near the presidential limousine, which was hidden from view under the south side covered drive. Numerous black and some white chase-and- lead vehicles were visible lined up through the intersection of Figueroa and Seventh. The short covered drive, with both its entrance and exit on Seventh, was totally hidden from Art’s line of sight, but he had seen it many times. It was similar to the one on the north side, though not as ornate, for lack of a better word. Anything other than his beloved, comfortable TraveLodge was ornate to Art.

Catercorner from the Hilton was a Los Angeles landmark, the 818 building, called the ‘eight one eight’ by the natives. Its light red masonry facade had been refurbished ten years before, when Art was beginning his tour with the L.A. office, and the interior was restored as faithfully as modern civilization would allow to its early-1900s decor, save the large, glass-encased show windows on its street sides. The old architecture of the city was a check in the pro column when Art was considering a move from the Chicago office to the West Coast. It reminded him of the beautiful antiquity showcased in his native Alabama, though scholars of design would tell him that the two styles were products of totally different influences. Art didn’t look at the subject that deeply. His was a simple appreciation: The buildings looked nice to him.

Atop the 818 a single two-man counter-sniper team was visible, the spotter’s head a foot or so above the tiny circular silhouette of his partner’s. Art knew the routine: the spotter would scan a sector, his slice of the pie, with the naked eye, using his binoculars only to take a closer look at what was seen with unaided vision. It might have seemed strange not to use the magnification of the powerful Bushnells. Not so. The unaided eye was the perfect tool of the spotter, able to detect motion over a wide area, which was the basis of his training. See movement where it should not be. The rest, following an instantaneous decision, would be up to the rifleman.

The engines of the war wagons behind Art started, signaling that the president would be leaving soon. He stretched out his left arm to uncover his simple, black Casio digital. Ten-thirty. With any luck he might make it home by one after accompanying the motorcade to the airport. His Bureau Chevy Caprice was only a few feet away, nosed south on Figueroa. He spit the wad of gum into the gutter — the flavor never seemed to last too long, or be very satisfying — and started for his car.

James ‘Bud’ DiContino, the Deputy Adviser for National Security Affairs, commonly known as Deputy NSA, labored down the stairs of the Hilton with his stainless-steel-edged Anvil briefcase in his right hand. He could have given it to an aide to carry, but the contents were sensitive and ripe from the meeting between his boss, NSA Jeremy Paley, the president, and the visiting British foreign secretary. His late wife had given him the case after some subtle comments about how distinctive yet practical it was. At the moment it was neither, feeling simply like a ton of weight, and making him wish there had been room in the elevator.

He didn’t really mind, though. This job beat the prospective future of his last one. An Air Force colonel working on defensive penetration systems for the Stealth bomber program in a time of budget slashing did not feel totally secure in his position. The challenges were gone, for him, in the military. Thirty years had been enough. Now he was invigorated by public service. It was exciting and ever-changing, and, most prominently, worthwhile, even with the political BS that came with the territory.

Lugging twenty pounds of material in his shiny briefcase, however, was anything but exciting. Bud looked at his watch as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Ten thirty-one. His wife would slap him if she were there. His lifelong habit of unconsciously checking the time every few minutes had grated on her nerves to the point that he had been required to remove his watch whenever he was at home. ‘We have clocks, sweetie’ was her explanation. He missed her.

The heavy fire door moved against Bud’s weight, opening into the hallway off the south lobby. He turned left at the direction of a Secret Service agent and walked quickly to meet the presidential entourage, which had already reached the ground floor and headed out to the covered drive. Bud stopped upon reaching the expansive lobby. The desk was to his left, and to the front he could see through the glass walls, watching as the president, his chief of staff, and Jeremy bade farewell to Foreign Secretary Smith with double-grip handshakes. Again Bud checked the time. Ten thirty-three. He looked back up, waiting for the president and his two advisers to get into the first limousine. That would be his cue to exit and hop into the follow-up car.

The handshakes ended and the president, a tall, snowy- haired man, stepped back toward his limo with a toothy smile stretched across his deeply — he would say distinctively— lined face. Then Sam Buck, the president’s personal Secret Service bodyguard, reached for the chief executive. His hand had barely touched the president’s sleeve when all hell broke loose.

The sight reminded Art of his short stay in Vietnam, all played in slow motion through the windshield. He first saw one streak of fire come from a hidden part of the 818 building and dive down to an area at the south end of the Hilton, followed quickly by a thunderous crack and flash. A second streak followed from the same unseen point, shooting through the smoke trail left by its predecessor and exploding closer to Figueroa in what looked to be a much fierier blast.

Art’s cop instincts instantly took over his actions, throwing his body out of the driver’s door into the street. His Smith & Wesson 1076 was already in his right hand when he rolled to his feet, pointing in the direction of the 818. There was no cover where he stood. For some reason the door of the Chevy had closed, leaving him crouched a few feet away in the open.

Then came the gunfire. A shitload of it, he thought. Mostly from where the rockets—they had to be rockets—came from, steady bursts from familiar-sounding weapons — M-16s. Then the distinctive cracks of repeated rounds from the counter-sniper teams atop the hotel. The others must have been blocked out, but they had a target. Art crouched and ran to the east side of the street for cover against a building and moved swiftly along its wall toward Figueroa and Seventh, looking alternately up to see where the Service rifleman was firing and then back to his front. Automatic fire from the bad guys was kicking up dust and fragments as the .223 rounds impacted the street and sidewalk. For the first time Art could see the impact area in the covered drive, though most of the scene was obscured by smoke from a burning black limo. Dammit! He looked behind. Three LAPD officers were crouched almost on his ass, following his lead, and, in the background, Art saw the war wagons disappear east on Wilshire, obviously going around the block. It was the 818!

Across the street two Service agents, one with an Uzi, and the other with a pistol and clearly injured, emerged from the drive and ran to the intersection’s center, finding cover behind a disabled chase vehicle. They immediately began returning fire and, almost as quickly, the injured agent caught some rounds in the head, which exploded as he crumpled into a ball at the side of the bronze government sedan. The instinct to go to the aid of a fallen brother lawman was suppressed by the reality that they had to get to the source of the fire.

Art peeked around the corner. About halfway down the already bullet-scarred Seventh Street face and five stories up, the fire was coming in steady streams from two windows. One of the war wagons came tearing around the comer of Seventh and Flower, one block east, and skidded to a stop over the curb at the main entrance. Its doors and tailgate swung open, disgorging the black-clad Secret Service CAT team. Two of the agents on the Chevy’s street side, one lying on his back, returned fire almost straight up as their three comrades raced into the building. A burst of fire stitched up the sidewalk to the cover of the building’s corner, catching Art with some shards of concrete kicked up by the ricochets, most hitting his jacket. One caught him on the right jawline and a trickle of blood began to flow from the half-inch wound. He recoiled around the corner, cursing in pain. One of the cops covered the cut with a white handkerchief, which rapidly turned to red.

“Fuck! This shit hurts!”

“Hold on, pal,” the senior cop, a three-striper, said. “It looks like it hit a vein.” He pulled back the stained cloth and probed the wound, feeling the dime-size fragment under the flesh.

“To hell with it,” Art shouted, pulling away. The handkerchief fell to the sidewalk.

The amount of fire from above dropped off. Art looked around again and could see muzzle flashes from only one weapon, but the rapid crack-crack of the long guns high above picked up, peppering the window where the lone source of fire was coming from. Puffs of reddish dust spurted from each impact on the brick frame.

“You guys game?” Art asked, seeing that they were. “Let’s lay some fire on.”

“Gotcha,” the sergeant answered, looking back at his two subordinates and motioning to a white Caprice behind the bronze sedan. Its roof had been opened like a sieve, and its windows spiderwebbed. “On my go.”

Art brought his gun up. “Ready cover.”

“Go!”

The two patrolmen, one still in his peaked cap, sprinted low the forty feet to the cover of the big car. Art and the sergeant stepped from the corner and fired up into the window. It was a long shot for a pistol, but the rounds were meant mainly to discourage. “Out!”

Both men returned to cover, ejected their spent magazines, and inserted fresh ones. The two cops were holding their guns above the trunk in two-handed grips, but not firing. Then it was clear why.

“It’s quiet,” the sergeant observed. He wasn’t exactly right. A lone Service rifleman was squeezing off rounds into the windows, which were all shattered, leaving only frames between the stone columns.

Art looked around the corner’s edge carefully. He saw two black suited Service men moving along the sidewalk against the wall of the 818, their guns trained upward. They weren’t the two who had rolled out of the Suburban. Those two were still at the vehicle’s edge, aiming up, one apparently trying to clear a jam.

For a few seconds it was quiet, almost silent except for the crackling of the burning car in the Hilton’s drive.

Then it seemed like the lights went out.

The blast threw Art back, though it was mostly a reflexive act. He landed on the sergeant as the thunder of the explosion rumbled in the street and shattered what appeared to be every window in the nearby buildings. He didn’t know how he ended up lying facedown very close to the wall — the sergeant must have rolled him there — but it surely saved his life, considering the shower of glass that rained down from above. Smoke and dust were everywhere, turning day to near night, and the sound of debris impacting the obscured area reminded Art of marbles falling into a cardboard box.

He pulled himself up and was joined by the sergeant. Both saw the pair of patrolmen and the Service agent prone in the intersection, raising their arm-covered heads to see what had happened. They were okay. Art came to a crouch and peered around the comer, rising to full upright at the sight before him. A full four floors of the 818 had been blown out onto the street below, two above and one below the fifth, covering and crushing the Suburban and both men near it. He couldn’t see either man, or the two who were about to enter the building, but they could only be under the massive pile of rubble, made up of both the building and its contents. The cop behind him said something into his radio, but Art couldn’t tell what. The smoky, fog-like haze that filled the space between the buildings on each side of Seventh glowed with light from the flames that were licking slowly from the gaping wound on the face of the 818.

Slowly, the police officers with Art began to converge on the piles of rubble, some trying in vain to find a sign of life. They worked without fear. Nothing on the fifth floor could have survived the massive blast.

“Goddammit!” Art swore aloud, safing and holstering his gun before turning to walk back to his car. Along the way, without even knowing it, he stepped on his mirrored aviator sunglasses, which lay in the street, crushing them to bits.

Bud DiContino brought his head up and was nearly trampled. Four Secret Service agents hurdled him where he lay on his Anvil. My ribs!

Outside, or inside — he couldn’t tell which — was mayhem. There was no glass wall where one had been, and no dull metal window frames. Only the heavy support columns, stripped of their decorative covering, were intact. The presidential limo was nosed into one directly in front of Bud, twenty feet away. Its roof seemed strangely ballooned upward and there were no doors on the passenger side, or any windshield, or any windows at all. Everywhere, though, there was glass: tiny blocks of the shattered shatter-resistant panes that had been walls. And there was smoke. Bud saw, cocking his head to the left as he came to his knees, that the chase limo—I was supposed to ride in that car—was burning furiously, sending a chute of black smoke along the roof of the covered drive. Only a little entered what had been the lobby, but it was enough to make the Deputy NSA cough for fresher air.

The four agents who had passed him only seconds earlier were half carrying, half dragging a hideously injured body into the lobby. Another agent was pulling the young Air Force officer carrying the ‘football’—the nondescript case that carried the codes required for the president to initiate a nuclear release — away from the front of the room. His arm was injured, and he was furiously trying to pull a small lever on the case just beneath the handle. The agent, also injured, heeded the officer’s command and pulled the lever. An audible pop came from the case, and then fine streams of black smoke, as the codes were destroyed.

Bud cringed visibly. The Air Force officer had just given command of the nation’s nuclear arsenal to another officer, an Air Force general, high above the plains of middle America in one of the Looking Glass command aircraft. It was an act authorized by only one occurrence: the death of the president.

Bud got to his feet, wanting to see if anyone was left alive, but his endeavor was cut short by an anxious pair of Secret Service agents, both of whom had carried the body in.

“Mr. DiContino, we have to get out of here.”

“Is that…?” Bud couldn’t finish the question.

“Yes, sir…dead. The chief of staff, too. And General Paley. Now let’s move!” It was not a choice, Bud knew, as the burly agent spun him around and practically carried him down the hallway by the collar. Ahead was another agent, gun drawn, clearing the way, and behind, though Bud could not see them, were the other two carrying the body of the president.

Praise Allah!

He prayed silently, thanking the Great One for bringing success to his operation, though it was only the beginning. There was much yet to be accomplished, much that could still go awry. But he had faith, as his mentor had in him, and worry would do no good. As it was, his comrades had penetrated the den of the Great Satan and exacted the first taste of revenge. The television news showed the scene over and over, obviously taken by a very lucky cameraman outside the hotel — lucky not because he got the pictures, but to be alive, as evidenced by the shrapnel-caused crack in the lens and his close proximity to the explosions. Many had been killed, some innocents, and that was expected. Many more would die before all was done.

The name he was known by was Mohammed Hadad, a combination of names he had taken from two long since departed fighters. His given name was part of his past, a life destroyed by the Americans, much in the same way his mentor’s life had been forever altered. The past was the past, not forgotten, only put aside so as not to interfere with the purpose. The purpose was all that remained to live for. Exacting a toll on the murderers of so many, a mighty toll, would avenge the spilled blood.

The TV picture faded at the touch of the remote control. Mohammed walked to the dresser near the window. The traffic sounds were audible through the glass as a dull rumble. Five or six floors higher up, where the very wealthy stayed, there would have been near silence. Mohammed’s room, though, four floors above the bustling Paris thoroughfare, did give a decent view of the city’s lights after dark. He was not accustomed to the luxuries, however slight in comparison to many of Paris’ hotels, but he admitted they were nice…for now.

A quick call to the desk settled his account. The convenience of American Express. Mohammed missed the irony of his thought.

His two bags were already packed and waiting on the fold-up luggage tray by the door. One last look in the mirror convinced him he was ready. He looked the part of any number of Egyptian businessmen, which was exactly what his passport identified him as. Mohammed missed the beard, having grown fond of its soft, furry feel when he lay down to sleep, just as his father had missed his after it was so degradingly shaved from his unflinching face by the Zionist vigilantes on the West Bank.

So long ago, Mohammed thought. He stood still and turned to the window and stared out upon the city, though the picture in his mind was that of a small wood-and-stone dwelling a scant mile from the Jordan River. The land around it was hot and arid, and the few people near the Jordan lived similarly. It was a simple life. No, he corrected himself, it had been a simple life.

He came back from the daydream, looking again at the mirror. A smile came to his face. His neatly trimmed black mustache and hair gave him an air of professionalism and went perfectly with the clothes chosen carefully for him, and, as always, his smile was affecting. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and removed the clear-lensed glasses, putting them on. It was a look Mohammed wasn’t really fond of, but if it worked, so much the better.

The room key was on the bureau. Nothing was left to do. His flight from Charles de Gaulle was scheduled to depart in three hours. He gathered his bags, left the room, and headed to the stairs: elevators in this hotel were unreliable, he had been told. Along the way he thought of his brothers, martyred in the attack on the Americans, and of the words of his mentor, another Arab brother: ‘The wind is rising. Soon there will come a storm.’