Page 88 of Cross Down
First up is a dispatch from field offices in Oklahoma City and St. Louis. Agents from both offices are concerned that their SACs—special agents in charge—have gone rogue; they’re conducting investigations on their own, keeping everything close to the vest, not bringing anyone else in on the work.
Ned thinks,Is this the real deal or just some disgruntled agents using the current crisis to strike out against their bosses?
The second memo is from the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division, which—among its many duties—keeps track of foreign diplomats on American soil. This report is troubling as hell—it says that, quietly and unofficially, the Russian and Chinese embassies in Washington have sent most of their staff home.
Meaning?
Maybe that they know the District is going to be attacked in a few days, and they want as few of their people as possible in the target area.
Question: Are they doing this out of caution, having eavesdropped on domestic law enforcement agencies, or because they’ve either planned it or helped support it?
He puts that message aside, resists an urge to rub at the throbbing in his left leg just above his ankle, where two pieces of shattered ball bearings tore up skin and muscle.
Ned grabs the third report, this one from the field office in Cincinnati. Agents had immediately raced to the home of the late Lucille Palmer, whose newly widowed husband, Walter, was in shock. He agreed to give the FBI agents full access to his home and his wife’s possessions. The only interesting fact they discovered was that Lucille had belonged to a local book club whose five other members, both male and female, had disappeared after the news came out about the Union Station bombing. Leads are currently being developed on the background and whereabouts of—
Loud voices are coming from outside his office.
Getting louder.
Ned’s suspicions and paranoia have grown over the summer, and he gingerly slips out his Bureau-issue Glock 19 nine-millimeter pistol as the door opens up. It’s Barry Leonard, his aide, looking flustered. “Excuse me, sir, I told her you were busy, but—”
Barry’s elbowed aside by Her Honor the mayor of the District of Columbia Winifred Crocker, and Ned returns the pistol to its place. “It’s all right, Barry, I’ll see her,” Ned says. “Hold my calls, all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
The mayor strides into his office, dumps her large black leather purse and long tan coat on one of the two chairs in front of his desk, and sits down in the other, hands clasped tightly.
“Winny,” he says, standing up to shake her hand. “I want—”
“Forget it,” she says. “Right now, I don’t care about the time we’ve spent together or the bonds we have. Right now you’re the FBI, and you sure as hell don’t have permission to call me by my first name. Got it?”
Ned sits back down. “Got it, Madam Mayor.”
“Good,” she says, her eyes burning right into him. “I want to know right now what the hell is going to happen here in my city.”
“Madam Mayor, with all due respect, I think you should be talking with Chief—”
“That fool?” she interrupts. “He wants just two things—his photo on the front page of thePostand to run against me next year. All I get from him is the crap he gets from his folks who attend a law enforcement meeting twice a day.” She unclasps her hands, leans forward. “Ever since the sniper attacks and bombings started here in DC, I’ve been like a mushroom with the chief—kept in the dark and fed bullshit. That ends now, Agent Mahoney.”
He feels her anger and frustration roll over him like a huge heat lamp. He says, “All right. It ends now. Ask away.”
She seems taken aback. “That’s it? ‘Ask away’? No sweet words about going through channels or shit like that?”
“Ask away, Madam Mayor,” he repeats.
The mayor still seems surprised. “All right, well, this is a nice change of pace. We’ve always been treated like some goddamn poor relation here. We’re at the end of the line for federal aid, have no real representation in Congress—we’re mostly ignored. So tell me this, Ned: Who’s behind all these attacks?”
“We don’t know.”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” she says. “You’ve got to have some sort of lead, some intelligence.”
“I wish we did,” he says. “We’ve managed to make some arrests, crack some domestic terroristcells, but there’s nothing connecting them together. We have right-wing militia groups. We have people associated with Antifa and with Black Lives Matter. We have rabid environmentalists, anarchists, Marxists, and yesterday, we had a suburban mom from Ohio who wore a suicide vest and tried to murder scores of commuters at Union Station.”
“I know, I know,” she says. “I was there. But you can’t find a connection?”
“None at all,” he says. “My agency, the CIA, the NSA, and pretty much every law enforcement outfit in the nation are able to track these people up to a point, and then it stops. No incriminating phone calls, texts, or e-mails. What we do know is that beginning nearly a year ago, all of these groups got a sudden infusion of cash and intelligence.”
“A supporter with lots of money and influence,” she says.
