Peter Kirsanow - Target Omega

Almost simultaneously, more than a dozen DC police cruisers formed a perimeter extending approximately two blocks from the hotel. Garin presumed there was also a van behind the hotel, although he couldn’t see it from his location.

The vans remained parked for a couple of minutes without anyone getting out of them. Then a nondescript dark-colored sedan pulled up behind the van parked in front of the hotel. Two men in business suits who looked to Garin as if they had just auditioned for Hollywood roles as FBI agents got out and entered the hotel. Contemporaneously, six FBI agents in SWAT gear and armed with what appeared to be MP5s followed the suits into the hotel. They would conduct the search for Garin.

The SWAT teams from the other vans Garin could see fanned out along the sidewalk to surround the hotel at equidistant intervals. D.C. police appeared and placed roadblocks at the intersections of Fourteenth and K, and Fourteenth and L, to direct traffic to two detours at Fourteenth and I and Thomas Circle. Alarmed pedestrians didn’t have to be told to get out of the way as they scrambled as far as they could from the FBI perimeter.

Garin now heard the sound of a helicopter approaching from the west. He was fairly confident the air-conditioner overhang would shield him from the view of the helicopter’s occupants but retreated slightly from the wall so that no portion of his body protruded from the shelter.

This is quite a production, thought Garin. The numbers of SWAT personnel seemed to grow even larger over the next thirty seconds. Another dark sedan was waved through the roadblock at Fourteenth and K and came to a halt in the middle of the street in front of the hotel. The passenger door opened and a figure familiar to Garin got out. He wore a dark business suit and an air of authority. His name was Jack Sakai, the head of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Garin had met him several years ago during joint training exercises at Quantico. The heavy hitters were coming out to get Garin.

The Hollywood Suits emerged from the hotel and met Sakai on the sidewalk, where they engaged in an animated discussion. As they did so, Garin checked the surrounding buildings again, leaving for last the two sniper-friendly spots he had previously identified.

Atop the Tower Building across the street a curious maintenance man watched the proceedings below. In a tenth-floor window of the adjacent office building an office worker in a white shirt and red tie did the same. Garin slowly panned to the sniper-friendly locations. He saw nothing at the first but noticed a barely perceptible anomaly at the second. On the roof of the PNC Bank building, there was what appeared to be a slight discoloration in the otherwise dark gray metal façade of a window washer’s carriage. Only a skilled observer in a position precisely level with the PNC rooftop would’ve had just the right angle and cast of light to spot the discoloration.

While keeping his binoculars trained on the anomaly, Garin adjusted the focus carefully. He then closed his eyes for several seconds to dilate his pupils. When he peered through the binoculars again he thought he could make out something that might be a man. On the other hand, it could very well be an odd-shaped blotch of faded paint on the carriage. A Rorschach test. For anyone else, it was faded paint. For Garin, it held the potential for death.

Garin ignored the activity in the street below and remained focused on the Rorschach test. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, so that his gaze remained steady. He stared at the single spot for several minutes, willing some form of movement. Nothing.

Garin remained patient. His attention stayed fixed on the Rorschach despite an urge to wipe away an annoying bead of perspiration that perched on his right eyelid. He ignored the helo circling overhead. He disciplined himself to avoid looking down at the FBI teams on the street below. And he waited. Yet the Rorschach remained unchanged.

A moment before Garin was about to end his surveillance, a thread of sunlight reflecting off the windshield of the circling helicopter splayed for a millisecond across the carriage. In that millisecond, Garin caught the unmistakable face of one of the most lethal men in the country’s arsenal of covert operators. Approximately thirty hours ago, Garin thought he’d seen that face in a field in upstate New York. Now, seeing it a second time left absolutely no doubt in Garin’s mind as to whom it belonged. Congo Knox, Delta sniper.

Sergeant Knox’s exploits and capabilities were legendary. He could hit the proverbial eye of a mosquito in a hurricane at a thousand yards and disappear while standing at attention at midfield during the Super Bowl. He had more than eighty confirmed kills and an even larger number of probables. His longest recorded kill was nineteen hundred yards, using a fifty-caliber McMillan TAC-50. A man with such skill probably considered it an insult to be assigned such an easy target. Whoever had sent him believed there could be absolutely no margin for error.

Knox’s face and form disappeared with the flash of light caused by the helicopter. Garin scanned the area immediately surrounding the carriage and saw nothing. As he had in upstate New York, Knox was probably working without a spotter.

Knox, Garin reasoned, was positioned in the hide atop the PNC Bank to take out Garin once the FBI had him in custody or, perhaps, when Garin attempted to escape from the hotel. Either way, it was clear that Knox and the FBI weren’t working in tandem. The FBI wanted Garin alive. Someone else wanted him dead. That someone was giving Knox orders.

Garin looked back down at the entrance to the hotel. Sakai and the Hollywood Suits were still talking. The helicopter continued to circle overhead, and at the roadblock at Fourteenth and I a few blocks away, a television news sound truck appeared seconds later. The Hollywood Suits reentered the hotel as Sakai remained standing on the sidewalk, looking like a man waiting impatiently for a delayed train.

Garin resumed scanning the surroundings, hoping that he would find some clue as to why a large contingent of an elite FBI division as well as a Delta Force sniper were pursuing him. Crowds of pedestrians, emboldened by the lack of anything dangerous occurring in the last ten minutes, were beginning to form behind the roadblocks at Fourteenth and I and Fourteenth and Thomas Circle.

Methodically scanning the crowd, Garin noticed something odd about a solitary figure standing at the far right of the barricade at Fourteenth and I. The man stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, looking intently at the entrance to the hotel. His demeanor was different from that of the other spectators. His face was serious. He wasn’t there for entertainment or out of curiosity. He looked like a man performing a job.

The man’s physical appearance also caught Garin’s attention. He appeared very fit under a white polo shirt and tan trousers and had a bearing Garin recognized. The man was either former or current military. Elite military.

Garin examined the man’s face closely. Something about his face seemed artificial, yet somewhat familiar. He wore an Orioles cap and sunglasses and had an unfashionable blond mustache.

It was the mustache. It didn’t fit the face. It was as fake as the facial molds Garin had worn moments earlier. Someone didn’t wear a fake mustache, especially one as unflattering as that, unless his aim was the same as Garin’s had been — to avoid facial recognition. Whoever the man was, the capture or killing of Michael Garin was certainly drawing an interesting crowd.

Renewed activity at the hotel entrance caught Garin’s attention. The Hollywood Suits had reappeared and were in heated conversation with Sakai. The trio’s hand gestures and overall body language conveyed exasperation. Garin surmised that the Hollywood Suits were telling Sakai that the search of the hotel had thus far revealed no signs of a dangerous rogue operator wanted for multiple murders in Virginia and New York.