Ньют Гингрич - Collusion

As the lead car neared Towne Point Lane, the first intersection on the resort property, Gromyko announced, “I need an item from my suitcase in the trunk. Inform your men that we are stopping. No need for them to exit their vehicles. It will only take Petrov a moment to fetch it.”

Fedor spoke through a handheld two-way radio. He started to turn his head so he could glance backward to address Gromyko when Petrov lunged forward from the seat directly behind him. He had put on leather gloves and drawn a garrote from his coat pocket. In a well-practiced move, the massive bodyguard dropped the wire over Fedor’s head, pulling it taut around Fedor’s neck. Petrov used his legs to thrust himself backward. The wire nearly decapitated the unsuspecting Fedor, who raised his hands to his neck in a panic much too late.

General Gromyko had drawn his pistol and now pressed it against the back of the driver’s skull.

“If you want to live, keep your hands on the wheel and stare straight ahead,” he warned.

A sliver of light from under the bathroom door in Brett Garrett’s hospital room provided enough glow for the assassin to quickly survey his surroundings.

As expected, a patient was in the bed, but he was not the room’s only occupant. An Asian woman was asleep under a blanket in a lounge chair near him.

The assassin would deal with her after Garrett. The killer lifted his left hand so he could compare a photograph of Garrett on his cell phone with the patient in the bed. It was his target. Satisfied, he lowered his cell while simultaneously raising the .22-caliber pistol in his right hand.

Thomas Jefferson Kim opened the bathroom door directly behind the assassin, startling both of them. Still wearing a sling from the bullet wound to his right arm, Kim yelled and lowered his shoulders, charging the surprised gunman. The impact caused both of them to bang against Garrett’s hospital bed before they tumbled onto the floor.

Kicking his feet wildly, Kim scrambled to remain on top of the assassin while managing to grab his right wrist.

“Help! Help!” he hollered.

Now pinned to the floor by Kim, the assassin slammed his left fist against the right side of Kim’s skull with dizzying force. A second blow was delivered to Kim’s wounded right shoulder, causing him to yelp in pain. The killer’s third left blow to Kim’s jaw caused him to go limp.

Shoving Kim off his body, the assassin rose to his feet with his pistol aimed directly at the still-unconscious Garrett.

Boom!

The loud gunshot blast caused a confused look to appear on the assassin’s face.

Boom!

The assassin shifted and aimed his handgun at Rose Kim, who’d cast off her blanket and fired her Glock semi-auto.

He pulled his Ruger’s trigger.

Rose Kim had never been in a shoot-out before. She would later claim that the .22 round had barely missed her head. But everyone who had ever been fired upon believed he or she had been barely missed.

Boom! Boom! Two more shots—from Rose.

The assassin fell backward and hit the floor hard.

The FBI agent, who’d run toward the room when he’d first heard gunshots, shoved open the room’s closed door but positioned himself along the hallway wall. As soon as the door opened, Rose Kim fired into the hallway, assuming the assassin had an accomplice. Her slug shattered the glass exterior of the office across from Garrett’s room.

“FBI!” he yelled. “Drop your weapons!”

“It’s me!” Rose Kim squealed. “My husband is hurt! I’ve shot a man attacking us.”

“Put down your gun,” he ordered. “Put it on the floor. Don’t shoot me.”

She put aside her Glock and hurried to her husband, still prone on the floor.

The agent edged his way around the corner, darted into the room, and immediately stripped the .22-caliber pistol from the assassin’s hand. Kneeling, the agent felt for a pulse.

There was none.

Bodyguard Boris Petrov stepped from the first Mercedes into the morning darkness. The headlights of the second car some fifteen yards behind him caused him to blink and shield his eyes. He waved his hand downward, and the car’s driver extinguished the front lights. None of the car’s occupants bothered to exit.

Petrov opened the trunk and reached inside. When his hands emerged, they were holding a Russian-made RPG-7, a shoulder-fired, reusable antitank rocket-propelled grenade launcher. He spun, and before any of the soldiers seated in the Mercedes could undo their seat belts, Petrov fired. At that close range, the blast from the explosion knocked Petrov down onto the asphalt. Flying debris from the Mercedes flew in all directions. Everyone in the car was dead.

Inside the first Mercedes, the driver pleaded, “General, I’m only a driver. I know nothing about any of this.”

“It’s a pity,” Gromyko said. He fired a round from his pistol into the back of the man’s skull.

Stepping from the safety of the car, he called to Petrov: “Can you walk?”

Petrov used his palms to push himself onto his feet. He had been struck by shrapnel and his face was bleeding. He tugged a piece of chrome fragment from his left upper arm. Gromyko did not wait for him. He started walking toward the trees to their right. Behind him, the second Mercedes was burning, casting an eerie yellow light across the landscape.

Gromyko found the eighteen-foot-long fishing boat moored at an inlet on the opposite side of the trees where Petrov had said it would be. He climbed aboard and called to Petrov.

“Hurry or I’ll leave you!”

The shell-shocked, bloody bodyguard came aboard. The general started the outboard and headed toward Chesapeake Bay.

Thomas Jefferson Kim had been knocked out by the assassin’s punches, but he regained consciousness within seconds after the nurses took charge. They checked his heart rate and helped him into the lounge chair where Rose Kim had been sleeping only minutes earlier.

“I shot him just like you showed me,” Rose Kim declared.

The FBI agent searched the dead man for identification. Nothing. He unbuttoned the man’s shirt. A bullet-resistant vest. Three of Rose’s shots were blocked there. The fourth had hit above the vest, ripping through the man’s right carotid artery where it was connected to his brachiocephalic trunk.

Despite the melee, Brett Garrett remained unaware in his drug-induced sleep. If he had been semiconscious, what had transpired would have seemed to him much like a bad dream.

The Day After

“The man who attempted to kill Brett Garrett appears to be Eastern European, but we have no other information about him,” FBI director Archibald Davidson said. “No fingerprint matches, no facial recognition, nothing yet to identify him.”

“Any idea how he entered the country?” President Randle Fitzgerald asked.

“None.”

“What about Agent Mayberry?”

“She’s still alive but has been put in an induced coma while doctors continue to try different levels of the antidote,” Davidson said. He withdrew several photographs from a folder and handed them to Fitzgerald, who was seated behind his desk in the Oval Office.

“These were taken by the Queen Anne Sheriff’s Department after gunshots and explosions were heard earlier this morning at the Russians’ Pioneer Pointe retreat,” Davidson explained. “The Russians refused to allow deputies or local Centreville Police Department officers to enter the compound. The enterprising sheriff used a drone to take these photos.”

“What exactly am I looking at?” the president asked.

“A burning vehicle stopped inside the compound behind another luxury car with its doors open. General Andre Gromyko was staying at the property. The private aircraft that brought him to the U.S.—a jet owned by Ivan Sokolov—had flown in earlier from Texas apparently to transport the general back to Moscow. That plane left without him about an hour after these photos were taken.”