Andrew Britton - The American

The younger man nodded his head. “I guess so.” He let out a long breath and leaned back against the wall. “This shit is killing me, John.”

“I’ve seen the way she looks at you. She’ll be waiting when you get back to Maine, I guarantee it. Listen, go back to the hotel. Shower, shave, get some food and a change of clothes. Then do me a favor and get your ass back here. Naomi’s lost without you.”

The last part was said with a smile. Ryan managed to return it briefly before pushing off the wall and moving toward the elevators. He was almost there when Harper’s voice rang out behind him.

“He’s close, Ryan.”

Turning to look into the other man’s face, Kealey could do nothing more than hope to God he was right.

“Trust me, it’s almost over.”

When Jonathan Harper went looking for Kealey in the early afternoon at Tyson’s Corner, he found him seated back at Naomi’s side. Ryan had taken his earlier suggestions and now looked almost presentable, although his choice of clothing still left something to be desired. In a room filled with clean-cut FBI agents and representatives from the State Department, Kealey was wearing faded jeans and a threadbare dress shirt — over a T-shirt, untucked — with the first three buttons undone.

Harper shook his head at the younger man’s pointed efforts to avoid conformity, but knew that he would let it slide. As far as results were concerned, the deputy director thought that Ryan was the most valuable person in the room, and at the moment, results were all that he cared about.

They looked up from the maps they were going over as he approached. “Got a minute?”

Naomi nodded and pulled out a chair. As Harper sat down, they immediately noticed that he was wearing a slight smile. He placed a pile of bank statements on the table in front of them.

“We finally got something on those Saudi passports the Feds picked up at National Airport. Theresa Barzan held accounts in three major banks in London, accounts into which several large deposits were recently made. Want to guess where the money came from?”

“Tehran?” Naomi ventured.

“Try Sudan. First Central Bank of Khartoum. Clever move on the woman’s part… We have no diplomatic relations with the Sudanese, so we can’t pressure them to release the depositor’s name.”

“But we can track the money from London, right?” Ryan asked. He frowned slightly. “It wasn’t actually the Feds that came up with this, was it?”

“No, it got kicked up to the FATF. The Treasury Department figured that would result in more British cooperation.”

Ryan nodded in approval. The Financial Action Task Force on money laundering had been set up in the late-1980s to combat organized crime, but since 9/11 had become increasingly involved in the process of tracking terrorist funds. Both the U.S. and the U.K. were charter members. “This is a definite lead, but the problem is time.”

“I agree,” Naomi said. She traced a finger down one of the long columns of numbers. “This is pretty typical, what she’s done here. It’s called smurfing. By breaking down the funds into tiny amounts, it usually ends up getting lost in the huge number of transactions that take place each day. And this is only the beginning. From London, she would have routed the original sum through at least another dozen banks. Even with the starting point, it’s going to take a while to trace it to the recipient.”

“All the more reason for us to follow up on Ryan’s idea,” Harper responded. He pushed a second sheet of paper toward them. It was the letterhead that immediately caught their attention. “This one is nothing helpful,” Harper said. “So don’t get your hopes up. The French Foreign Office sent off a rocket to the State Department earlier today with an inquiry as to ‘the current state of our terrorist threat.’ Basically, they wanted to know if we have things under control, and they weren’t too delicate about letting us know what they thought of our security measures.”

Naomi looked surprised, and Ryan let out a low whistle. “I’ll bet that didn’t go over too well.”

The deputy director smiled ruefully. “You don’t know the half of it. If Chirac ever gets a look at the response we sent them, he’ll probably have to break off diplomatic relations on principle alone. Same thing with the Italians. Nevertheless, they’ve decided to stick to the schedule. I just thought you should know that they’re on their way. Whether we find him or not, this event is going to happen.”

Standing before the open doors of the cargo area, Vanderveen stared with satisfaction at the simple elegance of his creation. It was almost a shame, he thought with a brief smile, that he would soon have to destroy it.

The Ford E-350 van had been purchased from a retired electrician, and the cluttered cargo area looked as if it might contain anything other than 3,000 pounds of high explosives. The previous owner had rigged up handmade wooden shelves that were bolted into the upper portion of the frame, running from back to front the length of the van. Beneath the shelves on either side were broad sheets of flat pegboard, from which hung tools of every type imaginable. All of it had been thrown in for a modest fee by the electrician, who had quickly discovered that retirement was much more expensive than he had anticipated.

Along with the tools had come four large steel trunks that were 32" x 18" x 14". It had not been enough, of course; after running some quick calculations, and allowing for space for the conduit on top, Will had purchased one additional trunk through a wholesale warehouse in Richmond. Then he had bolted the five steel boxes to the floor of the van. Even with the additional trunk, he still had nearly 25 pounds of the grayish-white material that would not fit in the compartments. He wasn’t bothered by this development, though, as he was sure that the excess could be put to some good use.

His decision to use the trunks had necessitated a slight change in the circuit he had devised, but he still had plenty of number 6 caps at his disposal. At one cap per trunk, there was a little over 37 amperes running through the circuit, but the current moving over each detonator was the same as he had previously calculated: at just over 6.31 amps, it was enough to ensure the destruction of each cap, but not so much as to run the risk of an electrical arc, which would almost certainly result in a misfire.

He recognized that the use of the trunks was, at best, a weak effort at shielding the van’s true cargo from prying eyes. At the same time, he didn’t want to have to hang curtains in the rear windows if it could be avoided. Doing so would almost certainly arouse the suspicion of the police officers checking vehicles in the vicinity of the motorcade’s route. The drive into the city, when detection was most likely, would be the most dangerous part of the operation. Once the van was parked, he would be able to detonate the bomb from the safety of his overwatch position if it appeared that the device was about to be discovered.

Even if the president managed to escape unscathed, a possibility that Will found highly unlikely, he knew with complete certainty that nothing would stop his creation from realizing its full potential.

Vanderveen turned away from the open rear doors of the van and sat back down at his worktable, gingerly stretching his hands out across the smooth wooden surface. His fingers were sore from the strain of packing the SEMTEX H into the steel compartments, but he ignored the pain and opened Shakib’s document to page 117. As he scanned the compact lines of text and accompanying diagrams, Will thought that whoever had laid out the security plans for this event had made some serious errors in judgment, errors he was more than happy to take advantage of.