The Enemy Within

CHAPTER 21 HORNET’S NEST

Outside the Hoover Building, the capital city’s streets were filling up with rush-hour traffic. Even in the present crisis, the hundreds of thousands of workers employed by the various government agencies, businesses, and law firms seemed to be determined to carry on as much of their daily routine as possible. For all the outward show of normalcy, however, the unpredictable, ever more frequent, and apparently unstoppable terrorist attacks were striking nerves already worn raw.

False alarms were triggered more and more often, with less and less provocation. Whole buildings emptied into the streets at the sight of a package without a return address. Phoned-in threats prompted widespread closures of the Metro or the region’s major highways. Entire neighborhoods, from wealthy, trendy Georgetown to the hopelessly poor northeast sections of the city, barricaded themselves in by day and by night, desperately hoping they could seal themselves off from the terrorist contagion. The drab, olivegreen Army Humvees arid Bradley armored fighting vehicles posted to cover the capital’s major intersections and traffic circles only increased the sense of crisis.

London had been bombed flat during the Blitz and periodically targeted by the IRA, but Washington, D.C., had existed in relative peace for many years. Not since the riots following Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s assassination had racial tensions been so high. And not since Jubal Early’s tattered Rebels fell back toward the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 had so many in the American capital felt the oppressive dread of knowing that a deadly enemy lurked close at hand.

Around-the-clock television coverage fed the public’s barely controlled panic. The first pictures of each new terrorist outrage were played over and over again on every news channel, magnifying their scope and impact. In the fiercely competitive war for exclusives, every wild rumor found a reporter to repeat it, deny it, and then repeat it afresh often the same reporter and often within the same hour.

Even the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not immune to the general paranoia gathering force across the country. The security detachments manning its entrances had been reinforced by U.S. Army Rangers. Razorwire entanglements surrounded the building, keeping pedestrians, the press, and potential terrorists at a distance.

Deeply worried by the signs of widespread, almost crippling fear he saw all around him, Peter Thorn followed Helen Gray into the conference room adjoining Special Agent Mike Flynn’s office.

His Metro ride over from the Pentagon had been instructive. Uniformed D.C. policemen were posted on every train coming into Washington. They were backed by heavily armed SWAT contingents conspicuously stationed at every subway stop. Passengers embarking and disembarking were subject to identity checks and random searches. While the heavy security presence provided some deterrence against terrorist attack, it also reinforced the overwhelming feeling of entering a city under siege.

Thorn frowned. The nation’s capital seemed to be nearing a breaking point. They were running out of time.

There were only two men waiting for them inside Mike Flynn and his deputy, Tommy Koenig. Both looked exhausted. That was understandable. They had worked straight through the night trying to follow the lead he and Rossini had given them.

“Thanks for coming, Pete. I’m glad you could make it,” the head of the FBI task force said quietly. “You have any trouble getting through our watchdogs?”

Thorn shook his head, inwardly noting with some amusement the other man’s decision to use his first name. Evidently, he’d been promoted from nosy, Pentagon pain in the ass to helpful, fellow investigator overnight. Interesting. Well, better late than never. He took the chair next to Helen and set his uniform cap aside.

“What’s the skinny, Mike?” she asked.

“We’ve got a preliminary read on the CompuNet address,” Flynn answered. “Andy Quinlan’s team checked in an hour ago.”

Helen leaned forward, her eagerness apparent. “And?”

“I think we have a target.”

Thorn felt himself relax slightly. More than anything, more than he had wanted to admit to himself, he had feared that he and Rossini were only stumbling down the wrong path and dragging everyone else along with them. But they had been right. Their instincts were on target.

Helen, though, appeared unsatisfied. “You think? Or you know?” she pressed.

Flynn shrugged. “Let’s say the evidence Quinlan and his people have assembled is mighty suggestive, but it’s not conclusive.” He glanced at his deputy. “Tommy can take you through it piece by piece. He rode herd on the investigative team every step of the way.”

Koenig nodded. “Mike made it clear that we didn’t want to spook these people prematurely whoever they are. So Quinlan’s been working around the edges for the last twenty four hours.”

He flipped open a file. “Basically, what we’ve got is this: The phone number CompuNet gave us belongs to a house in Arlington just off the Columbia Pike. The place was rented nine weeks ago by a blond-haired man with a slight, but discernible, European accent. He told the Realtor his name was Bernard Nielsen and that he worked for a Danish import-export firm a company called Jutland Trading, Limited. Apparently, this guy Nielsen told her his bosses wanted him to explore business opportunities in the U.S. and that he needed a home base to come back to between trips. He signed a six-month lease and paid his security deposit in traveler’s checks. Since then, he’s paid one time by mail using personal checks drawn on a local bank.”

“Not from his business or from a Danish bank?” Thorn asked.

“Nope. Curious, isn’t it?” Koenig looked up from the file. “One of our guys took a little walk through Nielsen’s account records. There’s been a steady movement of cash money in and out but the balance has always been over five thousand dollars and always under ten thousand.”

Thorn heard the shorter FBI agent’s emphasis on those figures and nodded slowly. Again, that made sense. Five thousand dollars in a checking account made bank managers smile at you and generally kept them from asking too many inconvenient questions. On the other hand, ten thousand in cash triggered an automatic report to the IRS. It certainly looked like this Bernard Nielsen liked cruising in a comfortable financial zone that guaranteed him both flexibility and relative anonymity.

Helen frowned. “Does this Jutland Trading company even exist?”

Koenig shrugged. “We’re still working with the Danish authorities on that. The phone number our blond friend gave the Realtor only connects to an answering service. The Danes are trying to follow the trail further, but it’ll take some time to generate results.” He smiled grimly. “I can tell you this. I spent the morning breathing down some necks in the Commerce Department. And Commerce sure as heck doesn’t have any record of a Jutland Trading company registered to do business here in the States.”

“What a surprise,” Thorn said flatly.

Flynn nodded. “After I heard that, I gave Quinlan the go ahead to dig deeper near the house itself.”

Thorn looked at Koenig. “And what did they find?”

The shorter man’s grim smile faded. “That’s the inconclusive part,” he admitted. “It’s a transient neighborhood. Lots of rentals. Lots of people moving in and out on temporary assignments with the Pentagon or other government agencies. Lots of people who go to work early, come home late, and go right to sleep. Nobody really knows much about any of their neighbors.”

“Nobody’s noticed anything?” Helen asked, surprised. “Nothing odd at all?”

Koenig spread his hands. “We did find one reared couple who said they’d seen several suspicious men coming and going from the house at odd hours…” His voice trailed off.

“But?” she prompted.

“But this Mr. and Mrs. Abbot are both a little blind and hard of hearing. Plus, we checked with the Arlington police. They say the Abbots average reporting one prowler, rapist, or drug dealer a week. The cops don’t usually bother investigating their calls anymore.”

Thorn grimaced. Perfect. If this rented house in Arlington was a terrorist safe house, whoever had picked it had done a brilliant job. He turned to Flynn. “So what’s the next step? Surveillance?”

— That would be the standard procedure, he knew. Find a house nearby, move the occupants out, and put in a stakeout team to monitor the suspect’s comings and goings, phone conversations, and associates. Once enough evidence of possible wrongdoing had been collected, the FBI would obtain a search warrant from a sympathetic judge and move in. For a by-the-book guy like Flynn, that would be the best and safest way to proceed. But it would also gobble up hours and days he wasn’t sure they could afford.

Flynn surprised him. “No, Pete. We go in as soon as possible.” He pointed upstairs and growled, “When I briefed the Director and the Attorney General this morning, both were adamant that we take any action necessary to break this thing open.”

From his tone, Thorn suspected the senior FBI agent was leaving a lot unsaid. If anything, the country’s political and media elites were even more spooked by the terror campaign than the general public, and the political pressures to act were enormous.

Flynn turned to Helen. “The Attorney General herself is seeking a search warrant authorising an HRT raid. Once we have the warrant in hand, I’m assigning the mission to you and your section. You know the general area pretty well and you’re damned good the best I’ve got, in fact. John Lang concurs.”

“Okay.” Helen nodded flatly, taking the compliment in stride without any false modesty. She glanced at Koenig, getting down to business without wasting any more time. “What do we know about the house right now, Tommy?”

“Not as much as I’d like.” He slid a faxed copy of a real estate brochure across to her. “The place is fairly large about twenty-five hundred square feet. Four bedrooms. Two and a half baths. One story aboveground and a good-sized basement below. A one-car garage attached to the house.”

“Brick exterior construction?” she asked.

Koenig nodded. “Hardwood floors upstairs. Concrete covered by carpet in the basement.”

Helen looked up from the brochure. “I need more than this. Can we get a set of blueprints from the builder or the county records?”

“We’re working on it,” Koenig confirmed.

“Good. Now, what about numbers inside the house? Any data on that?” she asked.

“Nothing solid. We risked one drive-by earlier this afternoon and spotted two vehicles in the driveway one minivan, one Toyota Camry. There was another car, a Taurus, parked along the street out front. The Camry is registered to this Nielsen. The other vehicles trace back to different names and addresses. Based on that, we’re guessing a minimum of two suspects and a maximum of six.”

“I see.” Helen sat back in her chair, her eyes distant as she considered her options for several seconds. Finally, she turned back to Flynn. “Okay, Mike, what are my rules of engagement for this operation?”

Thorn knew that was the key question. The rules of engagement, or ROE, would determine the Hostage Rescue Team’s tactics. The looser the rules were, the more options Helen would have in laying out her assault plan. If she could assume the people inside were hostile, she and her agents could bring significantly more firepower to bear in the early stages, and they could use their weapons a lot more freely.

Flynn looked troubled. “There’s a snag. Without clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, I can’t get the AG or the Director to sign off on unlimited ROE. They’re too afraid we might nail some innocent civilians by mistake. So we have to tread lightly at first. I’m afraid you can’t go in with guns blazing on this one.”

Helen nodded slowly, hiding her concerns behind an impassive mask.

Thorn knew his own face was less controlled. He didn’t like the sound of this not at all. Taking out terrorists was a lot different from conducting a sweep against a suspected crack house. Success always depended on the maximum application of controlled violence in the minimum amount of time. Without that, the risks to the assault force to the woman he loved went up dramatically.

Despite his relief that the FBI was moving at last, he couldn’t help worrying about Helen’s safety. Concrete evidence or not, he firmly believed that house in Arlington held some of the terrorists they were hunting. If he was right, Helen and her comrades could be walking right into a buzz saw.

“I’d like to move in after midnight,” she said calmly. “We’ll have a better chance of catching these people asleep, or at least at a low ebb, then.”

Flynn nodded his understanding and approval. “I can buy that much time from the Director.”

“Good.” Helen paused briefly, thinking again, and then went on. “That should also allow us to covertly evacuate the nearest neighbors. I don’t like increasing the chances that we’ll be spotted, but I think it’s imperative. If there are terrorists inside, we have to accept that they have heavy weapons and that they’ll use them if they get the chance. I don’t want civilians caught in the cross fire if we can help it.”

“Agreed. Anything else for now?”

When Helen shook her head, Flynn checked his watch and stood up.

“Okay, then let’s start moving things into place. The clock is running fast on this one.”

Determined not to be left wholly on the sidelines, Thorn leaned forward. “I have one request, Mike. With your permission, I want to ride along as an observer.”

The senior FBI agent stared hard at him for a moment before replying. Then Flynn glanced at Helen, obviously making sure she had no objections. Finally, he nodded abruptly. “Okay, Pete. I guess you’ve earned the right to be in on the kill. We’ll find you a place in the command van.”

Thorn sat back, partially satisfied. He couldn’t do anything to reduce the risks she’d be running, but he knew he’d feel better if he were at least close by.

Much as he longed to lead the planned raid himself, he couldn’t think of anyone better qualified for the assignment than Helen. She had more tactical ability, fighting skill, and sheer guts than anyone else in the FBI or even in the Delta Force for that matter.

Amazing. Six months ago, he would never have imagined himself thinking that of a woman any woman. And now he couldn’t imagine being left without her.

Somewhere off in the distance, a church bell chimed once and fell silent.

Despite her Nomex-coveralls and body armor, Helen Gray shivered. It was well below freezing outside and the need to stay motionless only intensified the cold. She lay burrowed in a hedge bordering the street and sidewalk across from the suspected terrorist hideout. Her post offered her a good view of the front of the house.

She studied it carefully, looking for the slightest evidence of anything wrong anything that might indicate they had been spotted. Even with her night vision goggles down, she couldn’t see anything out of place. From the outside at least, the house appeared a perfectly ordinary suburban dwelling, identical to thousands of others throughout northern Virginia all the way from its sloping shingle roof to its redbrick walls and the white trim around its curtained windows. There were no lights showing behind those curtains.

Well, Helen thought coolly, it was time to find out exactly what was hidden inside that quiet house.

She keyed her mike and whispered, “All Sierra units, this is Sierra One. Everybody set?”

Voices ghosted through her earphones as her teams checked in, one right after the other. Sierra Three and Four, Paul Frazer and Tim Brett, were around the back, poised to enter through the rear door on her signal. Five and Six, Frank Jackson and Gary Ricks, were crouched behind the rear of the Ford minivan parked in the driveway. They would take the front door. Sierra Two, Felipe DeGarza, lay prone beside her as a reserve. Her own two-man sniper teams, Byrne and Voss, and Horowitz and Emery, occupied positions in the surrounding homes.

She would have preferred to lead the assault teams herself, but with the situation still so murky, Flynn wanted her in a position to exercise tighter tactical control over her sections if things didn’t go according to plan. Leading from the rear wasn’t her style, but orders were orders.

The head of the FBI task force wasn’t taking many chances. As a safeguard against an attempted breakout by the suspects, he had deployed a cordon of local police and other special agents in a wide net around the neighborhood. He even had a Blackhawk helicopter standing by on the local elementary school’s playground prepped for immediate flight if a pursuit became necessary. From the absence of any media nearby, she guessed that Flynn had also stomped hard on the Attorney General’s notorious tendency to curry favorable publicity.

Helen took a deep breath. Her next signal would open the ball. “Hotel One, this is Sierra One. We’re ready. Initiate shutdown sequence,” she said softly.

“Roger, Sierra,” she heard Flynn say.

Helen clicked her mike again. “All Sierra units, stand by. Wait for my mark.”

She waited without moving for the next reports to be repeated over the command circuit. It was crucial to take the suspected terrorists out while they were deaf, dumb, and blind. CompuNet already had instructions to block incoming and outgoing E-mail from the target address. Now it was time to take more direct measures.

“Landlines down.”

The telephone company had cut its service to the immediate calling area.

“Cell down.”

All cellular phone communications were down.

“L ights down.”

The streetlamps on this block blinked out as technicians switched off all electric power to the vicinity. Now!

“Go! Go! Go!” Helen ordered, sighting down the barrel of her submachine gun at the front of the house.

Jackson and Ricks were already on their feet and heading for the front door. They carried a door-breaker, a heavy battering ram with twin handles, slung between them. The restrictive rules of engagement prohibited the use of the HRT’s two favored methods for opening locked doors breaching charges or shotgun blasts direct to the hinges.

One. Two. Three. Helen found herself mentally counting the seconds it took her lead team to reach the front steps and get into position. They were there!

Jackson and Ricks rocked back on their heels and then slammed the battering ram into the front door. The smashing, tearing thud seemed loud enough to wake the dead let alone the suspects they were trying to surprise. The door sagged under the impact but stayed stubbornly shut.

Again! Another heave and more nerve-shattering noise. This time the front door gave way and fell open.

“We’re in!” Helen heard Ricks’ triumphant report as he dropped his side of the door-breaker and darted in with his weapon ready.

WHAMMM. The doorway disappeared in a dazzling orange and red explosion that lit the whole area. Caught full on by the blast, Ricks was blown in half. Jackson, two steps behind, flew backward off the front porch and landed on the lawn screaming in agony. He flopped around on the dead grass like a gutted fish.

“Jesus Christ!” Helen snarled. A booby trap. Those bastards inside had rigged their front door with a booby trap as a precaution against unwelcome nighttime visitors. Part of her mind was silently screaming in shock and in time with lackson. Another part, colder and more analytical, realised that knocking down the door had triggered the explosive probably a sheet charge mounted in the side jamb. Simple. Classic. And totally unexpected.

She tore her eyes away from the boiling cloud of smoke and still-falling debris at the front door. Ricks and Jackson were out of action, but she had other forces in motion. She keyed her mike. “Three, are you in yet?”

Frazer answered immediately. “Negative! Negative! They’ve reinforced the back door! It’s backed by steel!”

“Can you rig a breaching charge?” Helen demanded. The tactical situation was going from bad to worse at a rapid, breathtaking pace.

It got worse.

Gunfire crackled suddenly from somewhere in the back of the house.

“Shit! Shit!” Frazer shouted over the radio. “We’re taking fire! Christ!” The noise doubled ih volume as he and Brett started shooting back. “We’re pinned down, One! Can’t go forward! Sure as hell can’t go back!”

Helen gritted her teeth. She called the leader of the sniper team posted to cover the rear of the house. “Byrne! Take that bastard out!”

“Trying, Sierra One,” the sniper replied calmly. She heard him pause and caught the muffled crack of his high-powered Remington rifle. “Gonna be tough. Hostile has a flash-suppressed weapon. I’m having a hard time drawing a bead on him.”

Lying beside her in the hedge, DeGarza suddenly stiffened. “I’ve got movement in the right front window, boss.”

“Great.” Helen peered through her goggles, zeroing in on the window he had indicated. Was that a curtain stirring?

More gunfire erupted this time from the front of the house. The Ford Taurus parked on the street rocked crazily back and forth, hammered by the stream of rounds that tore through its doors and shattered every window. Sparks flew off metal in wild, corkscrewing patterns. Whoever was inside the house was making sure there were no attackers hiding behind the vehicle.

Helen saw brick dust and splintered wood puff up around the house’s front windows as her snipers opened up in an attempt to silence the still-unseen gunman. The curtains jerked wildly shredded by each bullet but the hostile fire continued without pause. She shook her head decisively. This was too slow. “Emery!” she ordered. “Smoke ‘em out!”

In response, a grenade launcher thumped once from behind her, hurling a tear-gas grenade toward one of the house’s windows. But instead of sailing on through into the rooms beyond, the grenade bounced back outside onto the lawn and lay hissing, spewing its grey cloud of tear gas harmlessly into the open air.

Helen swore sharply to herself. The defenders must have strung netting behind the curtains. She grimaced. Booby traps, reinforced steel doors, and now grenade netting. She and her section were attacking a fortress.

Alerted by the attempted grenade attack, the gunman inside shifted his fire away from the mangled Taurus to the homes across the street.

Helen and DeGarza burrowed deeper into the hedge as rounds whipcracked past their heads. The chattering roar of automatic-weapons fire rose higher. Someone else inside the house had opened up, systematically shooting into every piece of cover that could shelter an attacker.

“Jesus,” the stocky HRT trooper whispered into her ear. “Who are these guys?”

She shook her head impatiently. Their enemies were damned good. That was all that was important now.

Her gaze darted across the flame-lit, bullet-torn landscape in front of her as she evaluated and then rejected courses of action in the blink of an eye. That bomb-blasted front door gaped open invitingly, but getting to it would be impossible. There was too much cleared ground to cover. Anyone trying to cross that street would be gunned down before they took three strides.

The back door was out too. Frazer and Brett were still pinned down there, unable to get close enough to slap the necessary breaching charge in place. What did that leave?

Helen’s eyes narrowed as she made her decision. It was time to gamble. They were running out of time and options. Every passing minute gave the terrorists inside more time to destroy the information they needed or to prepare for a mass suicide.

She tapped DeGarza’s helmet to get his attention and wriggled back out of the hedge. The other agent followed her. Crouching low to avoid the bullets still flying past overhead, she made another radio call to the sniper team covering the front. “Horowitz! Keep shooting! Keep these bastards busy! Emery! Fall back and meet us at the school!”

With half its interior taken up by the radio and other equipment needed to manage a surveillance operation or raid, the five men inside the back of the command van were crowded together almost cheek-tojowl. They were parked out of sight, two streets away from the pitched battle now raging around the terrorist safe house.

“Damn it!” Peter Thorn slammed his fist into his thigh in frustration as he listened to the rising crescendo of gunfire outside and the desperate radioed reports from the stunned HRT assault force. He couldn’t just sit here idle while Helen and her section were cut to ribbons. He yanked off the headphones he was wearing and whirled around to face Flynn. “Your people need help now! Give me a weapon and three men and I’ll lay down a base of fire on that Frigging house long enough for them to break inside!”

For an instant, the older FBI man seemed tempted. Then he shook his head. “Not possible, Pete! You don’t have any jurisdiction here.”

“Screw the fucking jurisdiction!” Thorn snarled angrily. He started to stand without really being sure of where he planned on going or what he planned on doing.

“Sit down!” Flynn barked. His voice softened. “Look, Pete, think it through. Things are already bad out there. You really think throwing in another set of strangers with guns in the dark is gonna make them better?”

Thorn shook his head numbly, unwillingly admitting to himself that the other man was right. His instincts urged him into action. His brain told him an unplanned, unrequested intervention now could be disastrous. Plenty of soldiers and police officers were killed by friendly fire in the dark or in the swirling confusion of battle.

“Let Helen do her job,” Flynn said quietly. “She’s in command. If she wants help, she’ll ask for it.”

Lugging her submachine gun and a pack carrying extra gear, Helen Gray dashed across the playground toward the waiting Blackhawk helicopter. DeGarza and Emery, similarly burdened, ran right at her heels. They ducked low under the hilo’s turning rotors and scrambled up into the troop compartment.

“We’re in! Take us up!” Helen shouted to the pilot over her command circuit.

“Roger.”

Turbines howling, the Blackhawk climbed skyward, already spinning left to head toward the battle. It levered off just fifty feet above the ground.

Helen crouched in the helicopter’s open doorway, staring down as they slid low over the street. Orange flames and black, oily smoke billowed out of the burning Ford Taurus.

She could see Jackson’s body sprawled on the front lawn. They were over the roof of the house in seconds.

The Blackhawk pilot’s voice crackled through her helmet headset. “You ready?”

Helen craned her head to check with her teammates. They both nodded and gave her a thumbs-up signal. She whipped back around and confirmed that for the pilot. “We’re ready. Let’s do it!”

Rotors whipping through the rising smoke, the Blackhawk went into hover only a few feet above the roof.

Without pausing, Helen dropped out through the hilo’s open side door. Robbed of her natural grace by her weapons and extra equipment, she landed awkwardly on the sloping asphalt shingles. She teetered there for a second, fighting briefly for her balance. Breathing hard, she regained it and knelt down already tearing open the equipment pack she’d been carrying. DeGarza and Emery made the same leap and moved to her side.

Helped by DeGarza, she extracted the thin, rolled-up sheet of explosives she’d been digging for, unrolled it, and started tamping the charge into place on the roof. Emery crouched nearby, aiming his M16 downward.

Helen finished securing her end of the breaching charge and carefully attached the detonator. They were almost set. She looked across at DeGarza…

And rolled away from a hail of splinters as bullets blasted through the roof directly in front of her, fired upward from inside the house. She felt a sharp, stinging pain in one cheek and wiped away a smear of bright red blood with one gloved hand. Some of the splinters must have caught her in the face. “Jesus!”

Emery fired back, using three-round bursts to punch new holes in the roof. Suddenly, the FBI sniper jerked upright, caught by a bullet under the chin. The top of his head blew off, and he toppled backward, sliding rapidly out of sight.

Hell. Helen blinked away tears and felt the welcome inrush of a cold, focused, killing rage. At least three of her men were down dead or dying. She intended to make the bastards inside this house pay for that.

Her fingers raced through the last adjustments, setting the detonator for a five-second delay. “Done!”

Four. Three. She and DeGarza scrambled up the sloping roof and over the peak. Then they threw themselves flat, hugging the shingles. Two. One.

The house rocked under them. Flame spurted skyward, but most of the blast was directed downward through the roof.

With her ears still ringing from the enormous explosion so close by, Helen pulled herself back upright and peered at their handiwork. The breaching charge had torn a jagged, five-foot-wide hole in the roof. Smoke and dust boiled upward through the new opening.

She clapped DeGarza on the shoulder and shouted, “Come on!”

Then she unslung her MP5, skidded down the roof, and dropped straight through the ragged opening. Speed was life. They had to strike before the stunned terrorists inside the house recovered.

Helen landed heavily on a tangled heap of debris torn shingles, pieces of charred support beams, and the mangled corpse of a man. One of the terrorists had been right below the charge when it went off. Good, she thought coldly. One less to kill.

Ignoring the sharp, stabbing pains shooting through her legs and rib cage, she rolled off the still-smoking pile of wreckage and came up into a crouch with her submachine gun ready to fire. DeGarza followed immediately after her and came up facing in the other direction. He swung around after making sure they were alone in the room.

Helen summoned up memories of the blueprints she’d studied. They were inside what had been a living room before the HRT’s bullets and their breaching charge ripped it apart. She rose and moved toward a hallway that ran the width of the house. A hand signal sent DeGarza right toward the two bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor.

She turned left toward the dining room, kitchen, back door, and the stairs leading down into the basement.

Gliding quietly across the dining room’s scarred hardwood floor, she skirted past a dinner table and chairs and drew closer to the open arch connecting to the kitchen. Every sense, every perception, she possessed was at its highest possible pitch.

“One, this is Two. All clear.” DeGarza’s hoarse whisper rang loudly through her earphones. “Coming back your way.”

Helen froze. She could see part of the kitchen now. Not much of it really, just the glint of a glass-fronted microwave on one of the tiled counters. Was there something reflected in that dark glass? An arm? Perhaps a weapon?

Conviction crystallised without conscious thought. She shifted her aim and fired a burst through the edge of the doorway, tearing away chunks of wood and plaster. Before the stuttering echoes faded she was moving again, charging sideways to bring more of the kitchen into her line of sight.

There! She spotted a moving shape near the opening.

Helen squeezed the trigger again, holding her submachine gun tight on target as it spat out another three rounds.

The terrorist, already hit at least once, jerked again convulsively and fell back against a refrigerator, sliding slowly to the floor. His eyes were already open and fixed before his arms and legs stopped twitching. Helen’s eyes took in the dead man’s dark hair and light skin before moving on to inspect the rest of the room. It was empty.

“Two, this is One. Kitchen is clear. Come ahead,” she breathed into her mike.

DeGarza followed her in, his weapon still sweeping through controlled arcs as he checked potential hiding places.

Helen stopped facing a door left ajar. It led down into the basement. Her gaze fell on a dark smear on the door handle. Blood. Another of the terrorists must have been wounded in the earlier exchange of fire with Frazer and Brett.

She moved closer to get a better look at the staircase and frowned. It turned sharply at a right angle halfway down. This was going to be a bitch. And there wasn’t time to summon reinforcements.

She signaled DeGarza into position on one side of the half-open door and crouched on the other. Then she tugged a flash/bang grenade out of her leg pouch and looked across at the stocky agent. He nodded.

Counting silently to herself, Helen tugged on the grenade’s pull ring, slammed the door open, and lobbed the cylinder down the stairs, trying to bounce it around the bend. DeGarza followed the grenade down, taking the stairs two at a time. She hurtled after him.

They rounded the corner at high speed and took the last few steps into a long, low-ceilinged room lit only by the blinding strobes thrown by the exploding grenade. Helen sensed rather than saw motion in the far corner and yelled a warning. “Down!”

She and DeGarza dropped prone just as a third terrorist reared up from behind a sofa and fired a long, tearing burst from an assault rifle. He missed. They shot back from the carpet. Shredded by multiple hits, the man collapsed across the sofa, bleeding into the ripped stuffing and exposed steel springs.

Helen breathed out. These bastards were good good enough to shake off the effects of a stun grenade and fight back. Well, she thought wearily, maybe this one had been the last.

More gunfire rang out suddenly inside the basement, muffled only slightly by distance and closed doors. Crap.

Helen surged to her feet and sped down a hallway that led to the last two bedrooms and bath. DeGarza dogged her heels.

Without pausing, she kicked open the door to one room and rolled back away as the other HRT agent dove inside. She risked a glance and got a hasty impression of a small, starkly furnished room containing nothing but an unmade bed and a few closed suitcases. A bullet-riddled portable computer lay in pieces near the bed. That explained the gunfire they’d heard.

Damn it! They’d needed the information that shattered machine had once contained.

She swore again in sudden realisation. If the man who’d destroyed that computer wasn’t in there, then…

Helen whirled as the door to the bedroom behind her flew open. A fourth terrorist, this one a fair-haired man with pale blue eyes, stepped out into the hallway, already raising an AKM assault rifle in her direction. He was too close, and there wasn’t any cover she could reach in time.

The world around her slowed to a crawl. In the long, seemingly endless blink of an eye, she recognised the face she had stared at for so many weeks. The face captured in black and white by a Metro security camera. The cruel, arrogant face of the man who had planted the National Press Club bomb.

Reacting instinctively, Helen threw herself forward and slammed her submachine gun down across the AKM’s longer barrel, pushing it toward the floor. Her finger tightened on the MP5’s trigger.

Both weapons fired at the same time.

Helen felt something punch across her thigh and ignored it at first. Then she was falling backward as her leg buckled. She felt a second impact, as another steel jacketed round ricocheted off the concrete floor and slammed into her lower back below her body armor.

She tumbled to the floor still clutching her submachine gun. Clenching her teeth, she raised her head high enough to see the terrorist she’d shot. He lay propped up against the doorjamb. Her bullets had torn his chest open.

The fair-headed man stared back at her, breathing in shallow, gasping pants as the blood pumped out of his wounds. “A woman,” he whispered in amazement. One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a terrible smile and then froze. He was dead.

Helen shivered, suddenly horribly, terribly cold colder than she had ever been in her life. She could sense something wet spreading across her back, but she couldn’t feel anything below her stomach.

“Oh, my God.” DeGarza dropped to his knees beside her and smacked his hands over her thigh, desperately trying to hold back the blood spouting out of her severed femoral artery. “Hotel One, this is Sierra Two! I need a medic! Sierra One is down and hit bad!”

Helen slid slowly into an icy, black void.

Blight with an ashen Mike Flynn at his side, Peter Thorn pushed through the crowd of grim-faced policemen and FBI agents surrounding the Blackhawk. Medical teams were busy loading stretchers into the helicopter as it spooled up for an emergency hop to the trauma unit at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Blankets covered most of the faces. All four terrorists caught inside the shattered safe house were dead. Two members of the HRT assault force, Ricks and Emery, were also dead. Helen and Frank Jackson were still alive but only barely.

Thorn saw Helen lying motionless on one of the stretchers already aboard and stopped, rooted in place by his own despair. Paramedics surrounded the stretcher, working feverishly to stabilize her condition long enough to get her into surgery. One had his hands clamped around her thigh, holding the artery closed, while another slid a blood pressure cuff as high up as he could over the wound and started pumping it up, using the device as an improvised tourniquet.

An FBI agent he didn’t recognize stepped in front of him, motioning him away. “Sorry, sir. Medical personnel only. You’ll have to move back.”

A red mist floated in front of Thorn’s eyes. He moved forward, ready to fight his way through.

Flynn grabbed the agent and pulled him aside. He turned back to the blank-faced Army officer. “Go on, Pete,” he said gently. “Ride with her. I’ll take care of things here.”

Still not trusting himself to speak, Thorn nodded abruptly and climbed into the waiting helicopter. He crouched next to Helen’s stretcher, trying to ignore the muttered exclamations from the paramedics working on her.

“God, what a mess! I’ve got a major impact wound right near the sacrum … Jesus, it shattered her pelvis… bone splinters everywhere…”

“She’s deep in shock and bleeding out… keep that pressure up!”

“Trauma, this is Medevac One-One. Request immediate clearance. Suggest you alert surgical team…”

Helen’s eyes opened suddenly, bright blue against skin so pale it was almost transparent. She looked up into his worried face and said in wonder, “Peter?”

He leaned closer, whispering, “I’m here. Remember that I love you.”

She smiled drowsily and closed her eyes. “First time you ever told me that…” She slid away into unconsciousness.

The Blackhawk lifted off, climbing steeply as it flew north toward the hospital. Peter Thorn sat silently, holding Helen’s hand. Tears ran unnoticed down his face. He had some of the answers he had been so desperately searching for.

But the price had been terribly high. Too high.