Max Collins - Fate of the Union

Reeder and the blond were both running now, footfalls eaten up by the mechanical noise, like they were figures in a silent movie. Someone behind him was running, likely Rogers finally figuring something was up; but he didn’t look back, keeping his head down as he charged forward, well aware he was in a race with a younger man.

The blond guy cut from the aisle into the nightmare jungle gym of pipes and Reeder automatically slowed, peering through the PVC and metal maze, searching for any small glimpse of the intruder. Had he passed the guy? Had Reeder kept moving forward and now the guy was behind him? Then the son of a bitch jumped out of a cross aisle fifty feet in front of him.

They were in the Capitol and yet the guy somehow had a gun in his hand, a .45. Made of Senkstone, perhaps, one moving damn part at a time.

“Gun!” Reeder shouted, for the third time in two days, and threw himself against the pipes as the guy planted himself and aimed, Reeder bracing for the shot.

“Ow! Shit!”

Rogers!

He turned toward her, twenty feet behind him in his aisle. She was dropping to her knees, pistol clattering to the cement. He glanced back to make sure he wasn’t in the line of fire, and the blond guy was gone.

A door slammed.

He went quickly to his partner’s side and knelt beside her. She was on her back, moaning.

“How bad?” he asked.

“He... he got me in the... vest. The vest ! Then why, why... why does it hurt... like a mother?”

Murton, not far away, had crammed himself behind a furnace, walkie-talkie out as he barked into it, though he too was in a silent movie, drowned out by machines.

Reeder went down to quickly check something about the black furnace. When he returned in a minute or so, Rogers was in a sitting position and her gun was back in her hip holster.

“Shit!” she said again, the word handball-careening off the hard walls.

“We’ll get the bastard,” Reeder said.

“Yes we will,” she said, massively pissed, “and when we do, I’m going to kick his ass around this grand old building for shooting a hole in my best silk blouse. That’s two blouses ruined in twenty-four hours. Does this prick think I’m made of money?”

Reeder smiled, an arm around her shoulder. “You FBI agents aren’t usually so colorful. But could I have a slice of that ass kicking? Son of a bitch owes me for a suit, too.”

“Why the hell are you smiling?”

“Two things. First, you’re alive, and second, we saw our blond here — at the Capitol. That confirms it — this is the target.”

“Domestic terrorism?”

“If it needs a name.”

“Is that... that furnace made of Senk?”

“Probably not. I scraped paint off a side and got sheet metal. Anyway, it’s been running for a week. Miggie says every moving part would have to be printed separately, and there could still be stability issues.”

“Should we call the bomb squad?”

He shook his head. “If it’s Senk, they wouldn’t know what to do about it. We need that furnace off-line and disassembled for the lab guys to test it, run ’em through the gas chromatograph.”

Soon Capitol cops were swarming the basement, and — while a medic cleared Rogers — the Capitol PD explored the mechanical jungle. Others were searching the rest of the building, using the SIM card pic of the blond that Reeder provided via his cell. Nothing so far.

Chief Ackley approached and said grimly, “First shooting inside the building since 1998 — I don’t love it happening on my watch.”

“Building’s on lockdown?”

“Why didn’t I think of that? Thank God a hero like Joe Reeder is around to—”

“Screw you, Bob,” he said pleasantly. “Didn’t you ever ask a stupid question?”

“Sure. Here’s one — what the hell’s this about?”

“Filling you in is over my pay grade. Patti will do that, after AD Fisk clears it.”

One by one, Ackley’s subordinates reported in: nothing on the blond so far.

Rogers, surprisingly steady on her feet, came over and joined them, wincing as she put her jacket back on.

“Sure you’re okay?” Reeder asked.

“Hurts like root canal, but I’ll live.”

“Good to hear.”

“You caught a round once,” she said, “that missed the vest.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “My shoulder forgot to ache for a while.”

“Why the hell would you jump in front of a gunman for Adam Benjamin? Now that I’ve been shot in the vest, just the vest mind you, I sure don’t want to do that again.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t wearing a vest.”

Into his cell, Ackley was yelling, “How the hell did that happen?” Scowling, he listened for a moment. Then: “Keep looking, goddamnit!”

Thirty minutes later, back in Ackley’s office, coffees all around, Rogers asked, “Just disappeared ?”

The chief shrugged wearily. “It’s a big building with hundreds of doors, loading docks, about a thousand or so people in the corridors at any given moment, plenty to get lost in. Losing track of one person isn’t that hard to do, especially one trying to get lost.”

Reeder said to the chief, “Why was he down here with a gun? It’s not the kind of place you shoot your way out of.”

Rogers added, “And what was he here to do?”

“Good questions,” Ackley said tightly. “Here’s my favorite — what the hell is going on in my building?”

Rogers glanced at Reeder, who said, “He deserves an answer. See if you can get through to Fisk.”

She tried and did.

With the AD’s blessing, she gave Chief Ackley a broad-strokes rendition of what they were working on, what they knew, what they suspected, what they feared.

Finally, Rogers said, “I think you should probably shut down this building until that new furnace has been thoroughly checked, and till we know for sure what the intruder was doing in the basement.”

Ackley’s laugh was mirthless. “Shut down the United States Capitol, Agent Rogers? It’s like turning the Titanic — in mud.”

“What if you had time to turn before you hit the iceberg, mud or not?”

Ackley shook his head and said, “In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationals fired shots from the gallery of the House of Representatives. That was before any of us were born. Three men and a female fired thirty shots, wounded five congressmen... but the Capitol didn’t stop running that day. Trust me, nothing we say is going to shut down this place.”

“You have it locked down already.”

“Right, and I guarantee you, at least five hundred members of Congress don’t think that pertains to them... like half the laws they pass. Right now, you’ll see them strolling between offices, some heading downstairs for a late lunch. Then there’s the tourists who don’t have anywhere to go during a lockdown.”

“Damnit,” Rogers said.

Reeder said, “She gets grouchy when somebody shoots her. Tell her what you can do, Bob.”

“Agent Rogers, my people will go through that basement inch by inch, using human eyes and every high-tech tool. I will find out why our interloper was down there, and how he got through security with a weapon.”

Rogers’s cell vibrated. She rose and went out into the outer office to take the call.

Ackley said to Reeder, “You think this Senk stuff is a real threat?”

“I do,” Reeder said. “But that new furnace isn’t what we’re looking for.”

“But the target is this building?”

“Maybe, or the White House, or even something nonpolitical — I don’t know. Remember Guy Fawkes?”

“The Gunpowder Plot,” Ackley said.