The Enemy Within

Lang, Tanner, and McDowell were all gathered in the teachers’ lounge he had turned into his own private command center. One other man was there beside them, and she recognised him as the head of the FBI negotiating team.

McDowell preferred deliberating outside the organised chaos of the primary operations center, and she couldn’t blame him for that. The lounge was a small, quieter place. The four senior men stood grouped around a coffee-stained worktable, intently studying blueprints of the temple complex. Along the wall behind them, a small cadre of junior FBI agents in their trademark grey suits manned a bank of tactical radios and secure phones.

Lang looked up at her approach. “You feeling okay, Helen?” he asked.

“Fine.” She’d made sure her troops slept through the morning and early afternoon and she’d managed to grab a quick catnap herself. Sleep discipline was emphasised by HRT training. Of course, if this siege dragged on much longer, Lang would have to bring in another section to spell them. She shied away from that thought. Hearing those has lards inside the synagogue only made her more eager to be in at the finish.

“What’s up, John?”

“Nothing good.”

“Still no word from inside?”

Lang shook his head grimly. So far, despite every effort, they’d failed to establish two-way communication with the hostage-takers. There were no phones in the temple choir loft and the terrorists were apparently too afraid of police sharpshooters to risk venturing out of their improvised fortress to find one downstairs. Even an offer the FBI negotiators had made by loudspeaker to hand-carry a portable phone inside had so far gone unanswered and unheeded.

And an early hope that the unknown terrorists might be driven out of the choir loft by thirst had been quickly dashed by the discovery that it had a small adjoining washroom. Right now the FBI’s only source of information on the bad guys was strictly one-way eavesdropping via the listening device her team had planted early this morning and now supplemented by laser microphones aimed at the synagogue’s large stained-glass windows.

“Now that we’re all here, let’s recap this thing and see if we can come to a consensus. Okay?” McDowell said brusquely.

Typical, Helen thought wearily. He locks me out of the room and then he acts as though I’ve been goofing off when he finally condescends enough to invite me in on the planning. But she kept her irritation off her face. Showing anger would serve no purpose and might only encourage him to needle her further.

“First, Captain Tanner’s men have finally located the vehicle we believe the terrorists used as their transport. Correct, Captain?”

Harlan Tanner nodded slowly, his own face impassive despite McDowell’s barely concealed dig. “That’s right.” He didn’t bother referring to his notes. “We’ve identified a 1985 Chevy Suburban parked down the street from Temple Emet as having been stolen from outside a Richmond home earlier yesterday. Every other car, truck, and van in the neighborhood belongs to someone with a legitimate reason for being in the area.”

“Did your people find anything in the Suburban that might give us a handle on what we’re facing in there?” Helen asked, butting in before McDowell could push on.

“Yeah.” Tanner looked straight at her. “Forensics is still going over it with a fine-tooth comb, but they’ve already found traces of a lot of bad shit.”

“How bad?”

“Carrying cases and cleaning kits for assault rifles probably AKs.” He paused significantly. “They also found the chemical signature for some highgrade plastic explosive maybe four or five kilos’ worth.”

“Christ.” Helen was appalled. That much explosive power, properly emplaced, could easily turn Temple Emet into a smoking pile of rubble. She turned to the head of the negotiating team an agent named Avery, she suddenly remembered. “You’ve been listening in on these goons. How many are we dealing with exactly?”

“Three, Agent Gray. We’ve identified three separate voices belonging to the terrorists,” McDowell cut in sharply, clearly irked that she’d been taking control of his meeting.

Avery nodded. “That’s right. The accents are a little blurred because of the distance between our mikes and the choir loft, but my linguists believe two at least are originally from the Tidewater section of Virginia. The third man is definitely an American English speaker, but his precise origins are indeterminate. Their politics are pretty clear, though. We’ve picked up a lot of radical, neo-Nazi jargons and sloganeering. They also keep referring to someone they call’a brother-in-arms.’ A German national apparently named Karl.”

“And their mental state?” Lang asked.