Designated Survivor (21 page)

The elevator to the sublevel was slow and Grace was tapping the door with his fist until it opened. The lone security guard that had been there days before had been replaced by several Secret Service agents in their suits and wires coming out behind their ears. He raised his credentials and they passed through the door into the ETTF.

Derek Arrington saw him enter and Grace looked around the room to find the least populated area and pointed then headed in that direction. His boss came over to the two men.

“What’s up? I didn’t expect you out here,” Arrington said. “Monroe is getting really itchy. He’s pushing the president and the Attorney General hard to take over.”

Grace opened his mouth to speak then stopped and looked at Ben Murray. “Ben has some new information.”

Caught off guard, Ben fumbled through the folder he’d brought with him and laid the papers out on the desk in order. “Uh, yes, sir. I’ve come across some data that, well, let me start from here, from the beginning.”

“Yes, please do, Mr. Murray,” Arrington said.

Grace watched as the analyst went through everything he’d shown him back at Buzzard Point. Arrington asked almost the same questions he had and Ben answered clearly and kept the presentation moving while the NSA director listened.

“1:38pm. The call was made the precise minute the explosion started. The location of the receiving phone was here,” Ben pulled the final paper over, a print out of the Capitol building, with a red circle he’d drawn over the top of the House of Representatives. “The phone was above the cell phone jammers. It was the only phone on that end of the building that registered any calls, incoming or outgoing, for the duration of the siege.”

Derek Arrington took a half step back and looked at Grace.

CHAPTER 39

Grace closed the door to the secure meeting room as Murray, Arrington and FBI Director Jim Monroe took their seats. While he still planned to take down Arash Abbasi in his own way, any accusation against a member of the president’s cabinet had to go through the feds. He would just be careful what information he shared in order to keep his hunt for the Persian terrorist alive.

“What’s up, Derek?” Monroe said. He glanced at the analyst and over at Grace. “You guys finally ready to play nice and share intel?”

“We’re not just going to share intel,” Grace said. “We’re going to give it to you on a silver platter.”

The meeting went mostly as Grace expected, the FBI director listening intently, asking minimal questions and taking in everything he could. He was one of the modern era’s directors who had never served as an agent but came from a law background.

As the young analyst finished, leaving the image of the Capitol in the middle of the table, Jim Monroe leaned back in his chair then looked at each of the other three men in the room one at a time then back to the print out.

“What else?” Monroe said.

“What else?” Grace said. “Doesn’t this say it all?”

“So what you are trying to tell me,” Monroe said “is that the secretary of transportation blew up the United States Capitol?”

“We think—or at least I think—that this call detonated the device, yes,” Grace said. “That Graham is involved, if not in charge of, the attack. He obviously couldn’t have worked alone.”

“That’s a huge accusation based on a phone call,” Monroe said. “Couldn’t the number have been spoofed from a different device?”

Ben was caught off guard. He hadn’t even considered the idea. “Technically, yes,” he said.

“While the Capitol was locked down, Graham pushed to send in Special Forces, over and over,” Arrington said. “He resisted any other options, even though we all said that could trigger a response from the terrorists.”

“He was scared shitless of becoming president. He wasn’t trying to kill nearly a thousand people to take office,” Monroe said.

“Perhaps, but what about the phone call?” Grace said. “There were cell jammers inside the building keeping all of you from communicating with the outside world. The GPS puts the receiving call directly over the south wing of the Capitol where the mother lode of C4 was.”

“It’s thin,” Monroe stared at the document. “This isn’t a liquor store robbery here. It’s murder and treason at the highest level. We need more.” He leaned forward. “Did you know Graham ran for Senate in Illinois?”

“No, I didn’t, but still—” Grace said.

“He lost to Rebekah Abrams,” Monroe said.

“All the more reason,” Grace said. “He’s probably held contempt for the woman since then.”

“So much contempt that he jumped at the chance to be within her inner circle of advisors?” Monroe said. “He’s a man that’s fumbled his way up the food chain. How could Graham even orchestrate something like this? He’s barely capable of keeping his own job.”

“What do you mean?” Grace said.

Monroe shook his head and looked away for a moment.

“There’s talk of him being asked to step down,” Arrington said. “Frankly, his office is in deep shit. The FAA is bleeding money with all the new security measures he’s pushed through. And the only highway projects that have been approved in the last two years have directly benefited his home state of Illinois.”

“If this isn’t a desperate man, then who is?” Grace said.

“There’s a wide area between desperate and treason,” Monroe said. “Bring me something concrete or even better, drop it altogether. I know this man. To think he was behind the biggest attack on our government since the Revolutionary War is ludicrous.”

Monroe stood and nodded to his equal at the NSA then left the room.

“Something concrete,” Grace said.

“He’s right,” Arrington said. “If we want it clean, it has to be done his way.”

“I could just nab Graham and interrogate him,” Grace said.

“Not funny,” Arrington said. “Find something else. I’m with you on this, but watch your back. We don’t want Monroe and DOJ coming down on us for following a lead they don’t believe in.”

Arrington left and Grace sat down across the table from Ben.

“What now?” Ben said.

“How can we know if the number was spoofed?” Grace said.

“Only real way is to get a look at the phone, see if the call shows up in its history,” Ben said.

“You think we’re right?” Grace said.

“My job is all about data,” Ben said. “And numbers don’t lie, whether it’s cellphone tracking or offshore bank accounts. It’s like they say: follow the money. We have numbers telling us one man’s cellphone made a call that could only have been for one purpose.”

Grace looked at the young man. “You’re right, so right. We haven’t considered who was bankrolling this. We’re talking millions of dollars if not more. Does Graham even have that kind of money?”

“Let’s find out,” Ben said.

Ben sat at his desk in the ETTF poring through every financial record he could find on Richard Graham while Grace sat beside him, watching the screen.

“This might take a while,” Ben said.

“Nowhere to be,” Grace said.

CHAPTER 40

It was too fast and too sloppy. Abbasi knew that. But he also had no choice. He’d developed a plan, but there were too many variables and far more moving parts than he liked. Simple works. Simple is good. This was going to be complicated.

Ormand Baasch had gotten a look at the large heating and ventilation system and the underground channels that carried the air over to the three buildings. Once into the industrial building, security was low and there were only a couple of cameras to deal with. But to get to the machinery building required passing through a double-gated entry system with armed guards 24 hours a day as well as all the rooftop cameras watching everything that moved.

After the building in DC had been compromised, Abbasi had moved his team closer to their new target. Hiding in the suburbs was more difficult than urban settings, so he took a new approach. He paid $2,400 for an old, beat up former U-Haul moving truck that became their mobile office and home.

The president had stopped coming to the ETTF daily, working from the Oval Office and keeping communication channels open with the teams working on the investigation. He was to keep the men ready. When she was to return to the building the client would signal him. It would be their only chance.

There was too much to do, so preparations were underway, hiding what they could as they worked. They only had to get one man in at first to set the plan in motion. Then everything would begin rolling downhill so quickly they had to be ready for anything. Ormand Baasch was the only one who knew what it looked like inside so he’d make the primary entry. The next phase could take anywhere from five minutes to five hours and the clock would be running on how long the president would stay at the ETTF.

The international team leveraged their European members to make face-to-face contact when necessary, to reduce any suspicion of dark skinned men that so many assumed were terrorists just by the shade of their complexion.

CHAPTER 41

“What are you doing back here?”

Grace spun in his chair at the voice, putting himself as casually as possible between the assistant director of the FBI and the analyst’s computer monitors. He didn’t need anyone, no matter how much he trusted them, knowing what they were doing.

“Had to brief Arrington on a few things,” Grace said. “Thought we’d hang out a while.”

“You wanna,” she bit her lip and glanced at Ben then back to Grace. “You wanna go outside and talk for a minute?”

They stepped into the elevator and Grace reached to press the button for the first floor when her hand grabbed his. She pulled it back and pressed the top button.

He glanced over and saw a smirk on her face he hadn’t seen since the night they’d first met at a bar in Bethesda. He’d recognized her, but she hadn’t known what he did until the beginning of this mission. That first night was spent in a hotel room on Wisconsin Avenue and involved a lot of room service and no inhibitions.

He still didn’t know if they were dating or if he was just a physical thing for her, but he had no intention of asking. They provided releases for each other, her from the daily routine of helping run the largest crime fighting organization in the country, and him from the stress of never truly knowing if he was coming back from a mission.

He had no time to date, to get to know anyone, and he feared getting to know anyone too well. The closer someone got to him the more chance there was they could be used as leverage against him. He kept an arm’s length with his team as much as possible, though it was hard not to become friendly with the men and women you go into battle with.

The elevator stopped at the roof and he followed her out. The sun was low in the sky over the airport and the wind was whipping around the stairwell exit. She pulled him around the corner, sheltered from the wind. She pushed her body against his and he pulled her in tight. As she reached her face up to his he glanced around and noticed it was perhaps the one blind spot in the building’s security system.

He put his lips to hers and felt the warm, wet sensation of her tongue against his and then her burgundy fingernails pushing through the thick cotton shirt that was stretched across his back. Her right hand came around his waist then reached down inside the front of his black combat pants. Her fingers wrapped around him and he forgot to breathe for a moment.

He pulled his face away. “Here?”

She smiled. “Here.”

CHAPTER 42

Grace pulled the chair up next to Ben Murray and sat down and Ben glanced over at him. “You okay?” Ben said.

“Yeah, great,” Grace said. “Why?”

“You just look, I don’t know, flush,” Ben said.

“I was outside for a few minutes. It’s a bit chilly,” Grace said.

“Right. That’s probably it,” Ben said. “So, while you were . . . outside . . . I came across something.”

“What is it?”

“Going back through Graham’s financial history I found regular payments from Cunningham Construction.”

“What?” Grace said.

“So regular, in fact,” Ben said. “That it looks like he worked there.”

“How can that be?” Grace said.

“Well, he had to be doing something before now, right?” Ben said.

“True, but working for the company that planted the explosives in the Capitol?”

“It appears he left the company about six years ago,” Ben said.

Grace leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “This is far more than a coincidence.”

“Is it enough, though?” Ben said. “You probably only have one more chance with Director Monroe.”

“I want more,” Grace said. “Keep digging.”

The men sat at Ben’s computer and went through every public record they could find, as well as many that weren’t public. Once they began looking, Graham’s past easily spilled out before them. He’d started Cunningham Construction in Illinois with his best friend 20 years earlier and had helmed it as CEO for most of that time. A few years later a larger company bought control but let them run their own business, except for moving them to the Washington D.C. area where government contracts began to flow.

“Small jobs, mostly, but they’ve done well working for Uncle Sam,” Ben said. “They built up a good reputation quickly, so once they got their clearance to work on secure facilities they began getting more work.”

Grace watched the screen. “This plan was in the works for a long time.”

“They look like a legitimate company. How would they even pull off something like this?” Ben said.

“Of course they’re legitimate. They had to be to get the job. They then used that strength to infiltrate the Capitol without suspicion, hiring the contractors,” Grace said. “I need to talk with Arrington.” Grace stood and walked away, finding his boss talking to two men he didn’t recognize.

Arrington excused himself from the men. “What do you need now?”

“Just want to talk,” Grace said. “More info is coming in and I need to run through it.”

Arrington glanced around the room. “Well, not here. Too many ears. How about the roof?”