Target Omega

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Garin parked his car in the underground garage beneath the National Labor Relations Board building, on Fourteenth and L. Before getting out of the vehicle he put on a ball cap and replaced his sunglasses with black-framed spectacles. He’d already donned the contacts and nose and lip molds. Garin emerged from the parking garage carrying a shoe box — size, gift-wrapped package. He turned left onto L, made another left onto Fourteenth Street, passed the NLRB entrance, and went into the Hamilton Crowne Plaza, where he checked in. Having done that, he returned to the National Labor Relations Board building, where he presented himself to the Homeland Security guards at the security desk in the atrium.

“I’m here to see Member Halliday,” Garin announced.

A female guard pushed a pen across the desk and pointed to the registry. “Sign here. ID, please.”

Garin handed the Virginia license bearing the name Mark Webster to the woman, who placed it in a small metal box. “You can pick this up when you return,” she said.

Garin signed the registry while a male guard picked up the phone, pressed four keys, waited a few seconds, and said, “Mr. Webster to see Member Halliday.” The guard listened for a few seconds and then looked at Garin. “What’s the purpose of your visit?”

“I’m here to deliver a gift from an old friend of Mr. Halliday. Looks like it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

The guard repeated the information to the person on the other end of the line and then nodded. “His assistant will be down momentarily,” the guard informed Garin.

A few minutes later the elevator doors at the far end of the atrium opened and a stern-looking blond woman in her fifties walked briskly toward the desk. “You have something for Member Halliday?”

Garin held up the package. “The sender says I’m supposed to deliver it personally. I was told it’s some type of surprise or gag gift from a college friend of his by the name of McLain. He insists that I bring it to Member Halliday and then call Mr. McLain to confirm delivery.” Garin waved a piece of scrap paper with the fictional telephone number of the fictional sender.

“Member Halliday isn’t in right now,” the woman said, a fact of which Garin was already aware, having called each of the board members’ offices just a short time ago. “I can make sure he receives the package.”

Garin affected the pose of a diligent deliveryman. “Ma’am, Mr. McLain insists I deliver it and then call him, you know? He gave me a pretty good tip to make sure. Look, you can walk me up to his office so I can put it on his desk. Then I can call McLain and tell him ‘mission accomplished.’ Okay?”

Halliday’s assistant tilted her head to one side and shrugged. “Sure. Follow me.”

“Sir, step over here, please.” The male guard held up a metal-detector wand and motioned for Garin to step forward. Garin complied, raising his arms perpendicular to his sides as the guard waved the wand over Garin, the gym bag, and the gift box. The guard then opened the gym bag and gave the contents a cursory inspection before motioning for Garin to proceed.

Garin followed the assistant to the bank of elevators, where she pressed the button for the top floor, which housed the suites of the five members of the NLRB. She guided him to Member Halliday’s suite to the far right of the elevator bank. They entered the wood-paneled reception area and walked into Halliday’s expansive office with a view of Thomas Circle. Garin placed the gift box on the desk, then pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number, and said, “Mr. McLain, this is Mark from SpeedEx delivery. Just want to confirm that the package has been delivered to Mr. Halliday as you instructed.”

Garin disconnected and turned to the assistant. “Ma’am, thanks so much. I’ll get out of your way now. I can find my way back downstairs.” The assistant smiled and returned to her desk in the reception area. Garin walked out of the suite, the door closing automatically behind him. The eleventh floor was quiet. No one was in the hallways as Garin strode to the door next to the elevator bank. He glanced around briefly before opening the door and ascending the stairwell one flight to the rooftop of the building.

Garin took off the black-framed spectacles and put on his sunglasses as he emerged into the bright sunshine. The rooftop was flat, enclosed by a chest-high brick wall. He walked to the southern side of the building and stooped under the metal overhang of an air-conditioning unit. He leaned forward against the brick wall and looked across the alleyway that separated the NLRB building from the Hamilton Crowne Plaza.

The sidewalk in front of the hotel had the usual level of pedestrian traffic for late morning. There was no unusual activity on either Fourteenth or K Streets, or Franklin Square on the opposite side of the hotel. Garin estimated it would be no more than another five minutes before that changed.

He used the time to remove the contacts and facial molds and put on a dark blue cap and shirt retrieved from the gym bag. To anyone viewing him from a distance, he would resemble a member of a SWAT team. Garin then scanned the surrounding buildings for the location most favorable for a sniper covering the exits to the hotel, quickly concluding that the two best spots were the PNC Bank across from Franklin Square and the roof of the Tower Building on the northwest corner of Fourteenth and K. He would keep an eye on those locations.

The first sign of activity occurred a few minutes later. That didn’t take long, thought Garin. Several dark-colored vans appeared along both Fourteenth and K Streets. Two parked across the street from the hotel entrance along the northwest curb of K Street. Another parked along the southwest side of the hotel. The last one that Garin could see parked directly below him in the alley separating the NLRB building and the hotel.

Almost simultaneously, more than a dozen DC police cruisers formed a perimeter extending approximately two blocks from the hotel. Garin presumed there was also a van behind the hotel, although he couldn’t see it from his location.

The vans remained parked for a couple of minutes without anyone getting out of them. Then a nondescript dark-colored sedan pulled up behind the van parked in front of the hotel. Two men in business suits who looked to Garin as if they had just auditioned for Hollywood roles as FBI agents got out and entered the hotel. Contemporaneously, six FBI agents in SWAT gear and armed with what appeared to be MP5s followed the suits into the hotel. They would conduct the search for Garin.

The SWAT teams from the other vans Garin could see fanned out along the sidewalk to surround the hotel at equidistant intervals. D.C. police appeared and placed roadblocks at the intersections of Fourteenth and K, and Fourteenth and L, to direct traffic to two detours at Fourteenth and I and Thomas Circle. Alarmed pedestrians didn’t have to be told to get out of the way as they scrambled as far as they could from the FBI perimeter.

Garin now heard the sound of a helicopter approaching from the west. He was fairly confident the air-conditioner overhang would shield him from the view of the helicopter’s occupants but retreated slightly from the wall so that no portion of his body protruded from the shelter.

This is quite a production, thought Garin. The numbers of SWAT personnel seemed to grow even larger over the next thirty seconds. Another dark sedan was waved through the roadblock at Fourteenth and K and came to a halt in the middle of the street in front of the hotel. The passenger door opened and a figure familiar to Garin got out. He wore a dark business suit and an air of authority. His name was Jack Sakai, the head of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Garin had met him several years ago during joint training exercises at Quantico. The heavy hitters were coming out to get Garin.

The Hollywood Suits emerged from the hotel and met Sakai on the sidewalk, where they engaged in an animated discussion. As they did so, Garin checked the surrounding buildings again, leaving for last the two sniper-friendly spots he had previously identified.

Atop the Tower Building across the street a curious maintenance man watched the proceedings below. In a tenth-floor window of the adjacent office building an office worker in a white shirt and red tie did the same. Garin slowly panned to the sniper-friendly locations. He saw nothing at the first but noticed a barely perceptible anomaly at the second. On the roof of the PNC Bank building, there was what appeared to be a slight discoloration in the otherwise dark gray metal façade of a window washer’s carriage. Only a skilled observer in a position precisely level with the PNC rooftop would’ve had just the right angle and cast of light to spot the discoloration.

While keeping his binoculars trained on the anomaly, Garin adjusted the focus carefully. He then closed his eyes for several seconds to dilate his pupils. When he peered through the binoculars again he thought he could make out something that might be a man. On the other hand, it could very well be an odd-shaped blotch of faded paint on the carriage. A Rorschach test. For anyone else, it was faded paint. For Garin, it held the potential for death.

Garin ignored the activity in the street below and remained focused on the Rorschach test. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, so that his gaze remained steady. He stared at the single spot for several minutes, willing some form of movement. Nothing.

Garin remained patient. His attention stayed fixed on the Rorschach despite an urge to wipe away an annoying bead of perspiration that perched on his right eyelid. He ignored the helo circling overhead. He disciplined himself to avoid looking down at the FBI teams on the street below. And he waited. Yet the Rorschach remained unchanged.

A moment before Garin was about to end his surveillance, a thread of sunlight reflecting off the windshield of the circling helicopter splayed for a millisecond across the carriage. In that millisecond, Garin caught the unmistakable face of one of the most lethal men in the country’s arsenal of covert operators. Approximately thirty hours ago, Garin thought he’d seen that face in a field in upstate New York. Now, seeing it a second time left absolutely no doubt in Garin’s mind as to whom it belonged. Congo Knox, Delta sniper.

Sergeant Knox’s exploits and capabilities were legendary. He could hit the proverbial eye of a mosquito in a hurricane at a thousand yards and disappear while standing at attention at midfield during the Super Bowl. He had more than eighty confirmed kills and an even larger number of probables. His longest recorded kill was nineteen hundred yards, using a fifty-caliber McMillan TAC-50. A man with such skill probably considered it an insult to be assigned such an easy target. Whoever had sent him believed there could be absolutely no margin for error.

Knox’s face and form disappeared with the flash of light caused by the helicopter. Garin scanned the area immediately surrounding the carriage and saw nothing. As he had in upstate New York, Knox was probably working without a spotter.

Knox, Garin reasoned, was positioned in the hide atop the PNC Bank to take out Garin once the FBI had him in custody or, perhaps, when Garin attempted to escape from the hotel. Either way, it was clear that Knox and the FBI weren’t working in tandem. The FBI wanted Garin alive. Someone else wanted him dead. That someone was giving Knox orders.

Garin looked back down at the entrance to the hotel. Sakai and the Hollywood Suits were still talking. The helicopter continued to circle overhead, and at the roadblock at Fourteenth and I a few blocks away, a television news sound truck appeared seconds later. The Hollywood Suits reentered the hotel as Sakai remained standing on the sidewalk, looking like a man waiting impatiently for a delayed train.

Garin resumed scanning the surroundings, hoping that he would find some clue as to why a large contingent of an elite FBI division as well as a Delta Force sniper were pursuing him. Crowds of pedestrians, emboldened by the lack of anything dangerous occurring in the last ten minutes, were beginning to form behind the roadblocks at Fourteenth and I and Fourteenth and Thomas Circle.

Methodically scanning the crowd, Garin noticed something odd about a solitary figure standing at the far right of the barricade at Fourteenth and I. The man stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, looking intently at the entrance to the hotel. His demeanor was different from that of the other spectators. His face was serious. He wasn’t there for entertainment or out of curiosity. He looked like a man performing a job.

The man’s physical appearance also caught Garin’s attention. He appeared very fit under a white polo shirt and tan trousers and had a bearing Garin recognized. The man was either former or current military. Elite military.

Garin examined the man’s face closely. Something about his face seemed artificial, yet somewhat familiar. He wore an Orioles cap and sunglasses and had an unfashionable blond mustache.

It was the mustache. It didn’t fit the face. It was as fake as the facial molds Garin had worn moments earlier. Someone didn’t wear a fake mustache, especially one as unflattering as that, unless his aim was the same as Garin’s had been — to avoid facial recognition. Whoever the man was, the capture or killing of Michael Garin was certainly drawing an interesting crowd.

Renewed activity at the hotel entrance caught Garin’s attention. The Hollywood Suits had reappeared and were in heated conversation with Sakai. The trio’s hand gestures and overall body language conveyed exasperation. Garin surmised that the Hollywood Suits were telling Sakai that the search of the hotel had thus far revealed no signs of a dangerous rogue operator wanted for multiple murders in Virginia and New York.

Garin returned his attention to the figure at the Fourteenth and I barricade. The man also appeared intrigued by the exchange between Sakai and the Hollywood Suits, so much so that he removed his sunglasses for a better look.

The man had wolf’s eyes. Predatory. The feeling of bewilderment Garin had felt the last few days returned even more forcefully.

The man Garin was looking at was dead. At least he was supposed to be. Burned to ashes. He was John Gates, Omega operator. His corpse had been exhumed from the smoldering remains of his house in Dumfries. Garin had seen the destruction himself. He had learned all of his teammates, including Gates, were dead. Yet Gates was now standing in half-assed disguise behind a police barricade waiting for Garin to be apprehended by the FBI.

Garin shook his head. He had staged the Crowne Plaza check-in for the specific purpose of flushing out who was after him, but he hadn’t expected to be more perplexed after the maneuver than before.

Garin knew why the FBI was after him, and through Olivia Perry, by way of Dan Dwyer, he might be able to obtain information on the FBI’s activities. He might even have a contact point in Sakai, who appeared to be running the show. As for Congo Knox, Garin couldn’t very well walk up and ask him why Delta was trying to kill a US citizen in apparent violation of the law. But Garin might get some information, if not an explanation, from Perry and Dwyer.

Gates, however, was another matter entirely. His return from the dead raised even more questions than the appearance of Congo Knox. Why was Gates reported dead? What purpose did it serve? How did he know Garin had checked into the Crowne Plaza?

It was the last question that troubled Garin most. Someone within the law enforcement or intelligence community had to have informed Gates that a man using Garin’s credit card had checked into the hotel, and that information had to have been conveyed instantaneously. Someone within those communities was helping Gates maintain the fiction that he was dead.

Garin could think of no innocent reason for doing so.

There was nothing else to gain from staying on the roof of the NLRB building. But he wouldn’t be able to leave until the FBI’s search was completed and the roadblocks were removed from the surrounding streets. That might take another twenty or thirty minutes, possibly more. He might as well put the time to productive use. Garin took out his cell phone, punched in a number, and recited a series of digits.