Second Strike

CHAPTER 76

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.,}

^{AUGUST 18, 12:48 P.M. EDT}

Bor would emerge from the embassy soon. Of that Garin was fairly certain. He had a better sense for how Bor operated than perhaps anyone. Garin had served with Bor for two years as Omega operators, Garin as the leader and Bor as one of his most trusted team members. Each had saved the other’s life at some point—taking out a sniper before he got off a shot; providing cover while the other advanced. They’d slept shoulder to shoulder in rat holes, eaten rotted food, and dressed each other’s wounds.

But it went beyond being teammates. More than one Omega member had noted the similarities between Garin and Bor. Both were indefatigable, even for special operators. Both were smart.

Both seemed to have a death wish.

So Garin waited for the man to show. Whatever Stepulev and his windbreakered crew were up to, whatever damage they were primed to cause, it was a sideshow. Bor was the main event. Bor was the danger. Bor was Yuri Mikhailov’s Rider on a Pale Horse.

Bor had escaped last time. Barely. He’d been one step ahead of Garin throughout. This time, Garin had drawn almost even.

The traffic around Union Station was dense. A swarm of cabs flitted about its perimeter and a long queue had formed outside its entrance. Masses of commuters seeking various forms of conveyance were moving about the station’s interior and exterior. Lobbyists taking the Acela along the eastern corridor, staffers taking the Metro, visitors and tourists taking Amtrak to Chicago and Atlanta. Hundreds of shoppers and diners milled about the densely packed main hall or sat in the various restaurants and cafés, passing time or waiting for a bus or a train.

Christine Brogan was one such commuter. Normally, she’d take the Metro from her office on Massachusetts back to her apartment in Woodbridge immediately after work. But her schedule was off, as was her concentration, having been earlier disrupted by a text from her boyfriend, Gabriel. A text telling her that he needed space. A text telling her he had been seeing someone else for several weeks. A text.

Christine hadn’t seen it coming. Only a few days ago she and Gabriel had been sitting on a concrete bench near the Capitol Building planning to take a long weekend at a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains overlooking the Shenandoah. They’d been there before just a couple of months ago and had a marvelous time. When she’d told Barb Rankin, her college roommate, about the trip, Barb had shrieked that Gabriel was going to propose. Men didn’t take two trips with a woman to a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains just for the ambience. The first trip had been for a purpose. It had been a scouting trip to determine whether the location was a suitable place to propose.

The two eagerly began planning Christine’s future as a married woman. First an apartment, followed by a starter home somewhere in Prince George County, followed by two kids and an upgrade to a more substantial dwelling. Christine would take some time off from work when the kids were young but reenter the workforce when the kids were old enough for school. They had it all mapped out.

But then came the text. The coward’s way of conveying bad news. He couldn’t even tell her by way of a phone call, let alone in person. She’d read somewhere that today’s young men had less testosterone than their fathers. Her own father was sure of it.

And just like that, all the best-laid plans of Barb and Christine went out the window.

Christine floated through the main hall of Union Station, her mind on the cruelty of Gabriel’s cowardly text. Nearly three years of her life consumed by nothing more meaningful than a few dinners after work, the occasional weekend party or show, and every once in a while a trip to a nearby vacation spot. Nothing lasting, nothing to build on. Just treading water.

She wasn’t angry or even sad. Mostly, she felt numb, blindsided. Scores of people passed her, jostling and purposeful. To Christine, they were just a blur of suits and ties and skirts and pantsuits, one no more noteworthy than the next.

Except for the short, thin man in the white windbreaker skirting about the main entrance near the taxi stand forty feet away. As she approached, Christine noticed the steady, intense look in his eyes, which was incompatible with his jittery body movements. He radiated… weirdness. Yet it appeared no one but Christine noticed.

If anyone had noticed, it wouldn’t have mattered. It all happened before Christine took another step. The jittery man reached inside his windbreaker. A fraction of a second later a concussive blast lifted Christine off her feet and propelled her backward at the same time a fusillade of metal pellets and ball bearings tore through her limbs and torso, ripping off her left arm and leg and shredding her abdominal cavity. Strips of her flesh and shards of her bones mixed with those of scores of others and sprayed across the floor and walls of the edifice. Outside the main entrance the blast scythed the queue at the taxi stand, body parts covering the flagpoles and balustrade around Columbus Fountain at the center of Columbus Circle. Several limbs and heads were strewn along Massachusetts and Delaware Avenues, portions of which were smeared with blood and guts.

The blast knocked out windows more than a block away and could be heard throughout Capitol Hill. Within minutes NBC and Fox News had scrambled news crews from their nearby headquarters at North Capitol. The wail of multiple sirens drowned out all of the noise as multiple emergency vehicles were dispatched to the scene.

None of them would find any identifiable evidence of Christine Brogan, other than a fully intact cell phone on which Gabriel’s text still remained.