Tom Clancy Support and Defend

27

Darren Albright sat in his Yukon, staring at Ethan Ross’s house just twenty feet away. The damn warrant was taking forever, but to bide his time he had a walkie-talkie in his hand, and with it he listened in on the SSG tail of one of his two persons of interest.

From Albright’s mental picture of Ross’s movements, it seemed like he was on a dry-cleaning run at the moment, which made him look even more suspicious. One of the agents in the backseat of the Yukon was obviously thinking the same thing, because he mumbled something about maybe moving Ross from person-of-interest status up to suspect status, but before Albright had time to reply, his phone chirped in his pocket. He quickly stowed the walkie-talkie on his hip and answered his phone. “Yeah? Okay. Good.” He pocketed the phone and turned to the men in the SUV with him. “Warrant came through. We’re good to go. Let’s see what’s what in that house.”

He climbed out of the SUV and his three agents followed suit. One went around to the back of 1598 Albright while the two others took the six steps up to the front door.

He banged on the door once, shouted “FBI! Search warrant.” The three men drew their service weapons, 40-caliber SIG Sauer pistols, and Albright himself kicked at door. It had been a long time since he’d had the pleasure of a kinetic entry breach, but he executed it perfectly. The door cracked at the lock and splintered, and it opened fully, setting off a wailing security alarm siren.

Albright ignored the noise and he led the men through the door, his gun high in front of him.

But that single step was all it took for him to register a smell he was trained to recognize, even though he’d never quite gotten used to it. “That’s a cadaver,” he said over the sound of the alarm, and then he moved farther inside so that his men could sweep the area.

He found Eve Pang behind the sofa in the middle of the room. Albright was certain she was dead, but he knelt to check her pulse anyway. As the other two agents slipped quietly into the hallway to begin clearing the rest of the house, Albright pulled his walkie-talkie to his mouth. It was already set on the channel that communicated directly with the head of the SSG team following Ross.

He shouted over the siren. “This is Supervisory Special Agent Albright! I want Ethan Ross picked up right now! Consider him armed and dangerous!”

The terse reply came back instantly: “Understood.”

Albright stood from the body, hooked his walkie-talkie back on his belt, and shook his head in disbelief. “Son of a bitch.”

For the third time on this surveillance operation, Nolan and Beale had taken over the eye from one of their colleagues, this time a fifty-year-old woman driving a Vespa. They’d tailed Ross into the promenade of Washington Harbor, a dual-use office building/shopping area with a large public space. Ross was on foot in a pedestrian zone, but they could see him from their vantage point on Thomas Jefferson, so they’d remained in their cab for now. While they parked along the curb, they helped route other cars into the area to control exit points off the promenade, and the operation’s hub rushed officers to the ferryboats that left from the harbor for Potomac cruises just in case the subject tried to board.

Beale had positioned his taxi so that he could pick Ross back up first if he decided to slip around the harbor complex and walk back up north into the heart of Georgetown. The concern remained the man would try to slip into an embassy, and Georgetown was loaded with potential places for a spy to run and hide.

Just as Ross slipped out of sight in the promenade, a call came through both men’s earpieces. “Uniform Victor, this is control. Maintain the eye while we move SWAT to your location. Immediate arrest has been authorized, but we are advised subject is now considered armed and dangerous.”

Beale and Nolan were designated Uniform Victor. Beale responded into his headset, “Roger that. We’ll have him again in twenty seconds.” He glanced at his “passenger” in back. “This clown doesn’t look armed and dangerous.”

Nolan rolled his eyes. “Everybody’s armed and dangerous to SWAT. Otherwise they wouldn’t have shit to do.”

“I hear you.”

Fortunately, Beale saw Ethan Ross walking north a minute, back up the hill into Georgetown on 31st. Beale pulled in well behind him, stayed far back, keeping other cars between his cab and the man walking on the sidewalk. Nolan called in to the operation’s hub, telling them to put a unit back on M Street, a couple hundred yards up the hill. It was the next major intersection ahead, and therefore the next decision point for Ross unless he went into a building or turned down a little alleyway.

“Might be taking the towpath,” said Nolan.

Beale said, “Shit. You’re right. If he does, we’ll lose the eye here in a second.”

To both men’s surprise, however, Ethan Ross made a quick right off 31st Street into a narrow alley that led back over to Thomas Jefferson. Their taxi had been the unit stationed on Thomas Jefferson a couple minutes before, so they knew there would be no eye on their subject on the far side of that alley.

Beale called it in to control, who replied it would take at least ninety seconds to move a vehicle back onto Thomas Jefferson.

“Shit,” Beale muttered to Nolan. “Do I follow through the alley?”

Nolan hesitated. Then said, “Just pull up and take a look from the street. Don’t want to get stuck in a one-lane alleyway if we don’t have to.”

The cab stopped at the mouth of the alley; in the distance Ross was already more than halfway to Thomas Jefferson.

Beale said, “We’re gonna lose him. He can grab the towpath or head back down to K or up to M or he could—”

“Go!” ordered Nolan.

The cab pulled into the narrow alley just as Ross made a left a hundred yards in front of them.

“I’ll call it in,” said Beale. He rolled slowly, keeping his eyes peeled left and right in case Ross had a spotter helping him on his dry-cleaning run. While he drove he touched his finger to his earpiece. “Control hub, this is Uniform Victor. We are eastbound to T Jeff. Subject just made a left out of an alley. Still on foot.”

“Roger.” As the hub scrambled to route another vehicle into the area, Beale picked up speed in the little alley, hoping he’d be able to catch a helpful glimpse of Ross before he reached a decision point and disappeared from view. But as he passed the midway point through the alleyway, he had to slow because a pair of big garbage dumpsters were positioned along the wall on his left, cutting his clearance down to less than a foot.

Just as he drew abreast with the cans, a large dusty blue van backed out of a covered parking lot in front of him and stopped just feet from the grille of his cab.

Beale had to slam on his brakes to avoid a collision.

He lowered his window. “Move it, asshole!”

Nolan looked back over his shoulder and saw a sedan with tinted windows pull into the alleyway behind them. It stopped twenty feet back, blocking the cab in next to the dumpsters.

Beale saw the second car as well, and instantly he knew this was some sort of an ambush.

“I’m ramming them!” Beale slammed the transmission into reverse, because the sedan was smaller, lighter, and a few feet farther away than the van.

“Do it!” urged Nolan.

But before Beale could step on the gas, two men in black masks and black wool coats stepped out from between the dumpsters, just a foot from the driver’s side of the taxi. As one, they raised black pistols with long silencers.

Nolan screamed, “Watch out!”

Behind them the sedan driver leaned on his horn, masking the sound as the two masked men opened fire on the cab, peppering both the driver’s-side and the passenger windows with round after round from their suppressed pistols.

The two SSG surveillance officers crumpled onto the seats next to them. The cab rolled back a few feet and came to rest gently against the parked sedan, which was no longer blaring its horn.

Iranian Quds Force operatives Ormand and Kashan quickly slipped their weapons back inside their coats. With no words between the two gunmen, they reached through the broken windows and opened both the front and back doors. They pushed the bloody American bodies farther inside the car and out of their way. Ormand climbed behind the wheel, while Kashan sat in the back. They rolled down the broken windows, cleared away shattered glass from the doors, and watched while Shiraz moved the van out of the way in front of them, and then turned toward Thomas Jefferson.

The cab followed suit behind, making a right at the mouth of the alley.

Behind them, Isfahan climbed out of the sedan with a long device in his hands that looked something like a metal broom. It was a NailHawg magnetic nail sweeper, used by roofers for collecting loose roofing nails in grass. Quickly and calmly he rolled the device back and forth in the alley where his two colleagues had been standing, and he picked up eleven spent shell casings from their weapons.

He was back in his sedan a moment later, heading down the alley to 31st street.

Before the four Iranian assassins had even left the neighborhood, Ethan Ross entered in side door of the Venezuelan embassy two blocks away on 30th Street, completely unaware of what had happened behind him, and completely undetected by either U.S. intelligence or law enforcement.