Ньют Гингрич - Collusion

“Good morning, my distinguished friends,” he said, smiling, glancing again at the redhead.

The main doors at the back of the rectangular ballroom flew open. Looking directly down the aisle between rows of seats, Thorpe saw it all. Three figures. Ski masks. Kalashnikovs. Their gun barrels aimed toward the stage.

With a burst rate of a hundred rounds per minute, the bullets slammed into the wooden podium and swept across the stage, hitting both Thorpe and Ukraine’s foreign minister.

Screams. Panic. A State Department bodyguard drew his Glock 19. The other, a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun from inside his jacket. In the mayhem, both aimed at the same attacker, leaving the other two free to continue shooting.

The assailants had assumed the bodyguards would be wearing bullet-resistant vests. Head shots for a kill. The exchange ended quickly. The State Department detail critically wounded one assailant, who collapsed at the rear of the room onto the polished floor. Both Americans fell where they stood. Chief of Mission Harper lunged from his seat, bravely intending to throw himself atop Ambassador Thorpe. Bullets struck his back, killing him before he could reach the platform.

One of the masked terrorists fired indiscriminately into the panicked crowd. Two hundred attendees fighting to exit through a single side exit. The other terrorist helped his wounded comrade stand.

Brett Garrett entered the grand ballroom at the same moment the three assailants were about to exit through an unmarked side door directly opposite him that had been overlooked by attendees trying to escape. The first attacker ducked through it out of sight while Garrett raised his SIG Sauer P226 pistol. People hurrying by him blocked his view. He shifted to his left, finding a momentary gap, and squeezed off two rounds. His first missed, striking the door’s molding near the two attackers. His second round hit the intruder helping his already wounded companion walk. Garrett’s bullet pierced the assailant’s right arm, forcing him to drop his buddy. He bolted through the open doorway to save himself. The attacker left behind was now motionless on the floor.

By now, Garrett’s fellow private security guards had joined him. Two dashed across the ballroom in pursuit of the fleeing shooters. Garrett hurried onto the stage.

Vanity had kept Ambassador Thorpe from wearing the bulky protective vests that the State Department had made available, but the seasoned diplomat was no fool. Before arriving in Kiev, he’d flown to South America for a private fitting by the famous “Armored Armani,” who hand-made bullet-resistant clothing for Latin American presidents and American entertainers, mostly gangster rappers. Thorpe had ordered a half-dozen suits, nearly indistinguishable from those tailored on London’s Savile Row. His protective wear had blocked several of the 7.62x39 mm rounds, but the fabric had not stopped all of them. Three had penetrated the protective weave. One was now next to his heart. The ambassador was conscious but bleeding out.

Garrett had been with wounded men who were dying. He understood what Ambassador Thorpe was thinking. Surprise mixed with shock and anger. This was not supposed to be happening, not to him.

Through pleading eyes, Ambassador Thorpe stared at Brett Garrett kneeling over him. His final sight of a man whom he’d wanted sent away.

“My jacket,” Thorpe whispered.

Garrett reached inside.

“No. Other side,” Thorpe cajoled, coughing up blood.

Garrett removed a computer flash drive.

“The president,” Thorpe said. “Promise me.”

“A password?” Garrett asked. “Is there a password?”

There was no response. Ambassador Stanford Thorpe was dead.

Valerie Mayberry stepped off the Washington & Old Dominion Trail, which once had been a railroad track. A 1960s urban planner had decided that converting the right of way into a walking, biking, and running course would be a better use. Fast-forward fifty years. Local municipalities were spending millions constructing an aboveground subway line less than a mile away. Why hadn’t bureaucrats thought ahead? They could have used the original train path for the subway line. Mayberry noticed such things.

Her ultralight running shoes left prints on the January-morning frost covering the swath of dried grass and weeds that separated the trail from the high-density Reston, Virginia, Town Center complex, some twenty-two miles east of Washington, D.C. Entering Explorer Street, she jogged by PassionFish—all one word—a Millennial hotspot eatery tucked among the mix of high-rise offices and condos.

Mayberry cared about history.

Some people heard music playing in their heads. A looping tune. Mayberry retained an unending tsunami of facts, most only found useful at trivia nights. Founded in 1964, Reston was the brainchild of Robert E. Simon Jr., who sold New York’s Carnegie Hall to afford his vision of an urban utopia on 6,750 acres of farmland. Without restrictions based on race or income, he plotted a city composed of cozy villages each with lower- and middle-class and higher-end homes built together. Promising on paper, but troubled in reality. The nature paths turned dangerous to walk after dusk. The less expensive neighborhoods had become more expensive. Poorer families had been pushed into neighboring Herndon. That village was named after a Virginia naval officer who went down with his ship during a hurricane off the coast of Cape Hatteras.

A photographic memory and Adderall. A combination of four salts of the two enantiomers of amphetamine, a nervous system stimulant of the phenethylamine class. It helped her focus—although taking brain-enhancing drugs was generally not something the Federal Bureau of Investigation looked on favorably.

Mayberry’s six-mile morning run had lifted her mood. Self-generated endorphins. She needed them. Each morning she awoke sad. Technically, it was called “persistent complex bereavement disorder,” although psychiatrists couldn’t agree whether it was a legitimate mental illness, stating only in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that it was “under study” for possible later inclusion. She called it missing Noah. He had accepted her ADHD. She had accepted his constant need to save the world, right wrongs, and fight injustices. Her pragmatism versus his idealism. They had been a good fit.

Pit-pat, pit-pat—the sound of her shoes hitting the sidewalk slowed to a walk as she entered the Midtown, Reston’s most exclusive condo building. Monthly HOA fees ran as high as many nearby house mortgages. Shiny ornate lobby. Valet parking. Doorman. Swimming pool. Owner’s gym. Big-screen-television party area. The works, including views of the Blue Ridge Mountains from her sixteenth-floor unit.

“Good morning, Mrs. Williams,” a perky recent community college grad with cascading blond hair and perfectly polished teeth chirped from behind the lobby’s front desk.

Williams had been Noah’s surname. She’d not legally changed hers from Mayberry after they’d married, but she was identified on the condo’s register of residents as Williams. It had made Noah happy and provided her with a thin veil of security if someone snooped into her professional life as an FBI agent. She still wore her wedding ring, although that had nothing to do with hiding her identity. There was something definite about taking it off—a final admission—that she wasn’t yet ready to make.

“Good morning, Summer,” Mayberry replied, silently wondering what kinds of parents name children after seasons.

Her cell phone rang while she was in the shower thinking of Noah.

Her wet feet hit the bathroom’s heated tile floor. “This is Valerie.”