The Enemy Within

Still, the Bosnian didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. That was why he had waited so long to enter the press club building and ride its small elevator up to the third floor. With less than two hours to go before the day’s luncheon, the corridors should be comfortably crowded. He followed several other technicians out of the elevator. Like him, they were draped in coils of cable and weighed down by tripods and other equipment.

As he had hoped, the building’s third floor looked even busier than usual. This was Halovic’s second visit to the press club. The first had come more than three weeks before, shortly after he and his team received General Taleh’s go code and began making the final scouting trips laid out in his operational plan.

The Bosnian joined the bustling crowds moving slowly through the lobby across a floor of heavily veined, polished tan marble. To his left was the Members Bar, dark-paneled and comfortable, with windows that overlooked the street. Even at this hour it was smoke-filled and noisy, already packed with reporters swapping drinks and stories.

He drifted right, heading for the entrance to the dining room.

A table blocked most of the entrance and a man in a suit sat behind it, checking badges. Suppressing a moment’s nervousness, Halovic joined the short line waiting to pass through the barrier. Intellectually, he knew that the odds were in his favor. Since the Reverend Steele was not yet an announced presidential candidate of any sort, the hard-faced men of the U.S. Secret Service were not here in great numbers. Certainly, the man behind the table seemed more a functionary than a watchdog.

He shuffled forward and, without unclipping it from his shirt, turned his press pass to face the checker. He was careful not to make eye contact. The man glanced up, focused on the picture for barely a second, then waved him through with a bored nod.

Hiding his sudden surge of relief, Halovic shouldered his gear and trudged down a short hallway into the main dining room. He had crossed the wire without tripping any alarms.

The dining hall itself was not as large as he had expected. While it was not shabby, it had a low ceiling and wasn’t nearly as ornate as the cavernous meeting rooms maintained by the area’s better hotels. Speakers appearing before the National Press Club were interested in exposure, not in decor. And the members themselves preferred to invest their limited resources in items closer to their hearts than fine furnishings, china, and silverware. Apparently, they reserved most of their funds for keeping the club bar well stocked.

Halovic briefly paused in the doorway to get his bearings. Toward the rear of the room, technicians swarmed over a tangle of cameras, video monitors, and boxes full of electronics gear. Waiters moved briskly among the round tables arrayed before a long head table, laying out white linen tablecloths and place settings. Everyone in view seemed busy. By 11:30 the room had to be ready for two hundred of Washington’s movers and shakers: working reporters, congressmen, administration officials, and influential lawyers and lobbyists.

He checked his own watch: 10:17 A.M. More than enough time. Sidling through the crowd in the rear, he studied the room layout with greater care. As expected, television cameras lined the back wall, stationed on an elevated platform so they had a clear shot of the head table and speaker’s podium. The floor underneath the platform was littered with dark-colored cables and brightly colored boxes that were labeled “CBS,” “CNN,” and a host of other networks, both large and —~small. Behind the camera platform was a ten-foot-wide area where technicians crouched over video recorders and miniature TV monitors. Wearing headphones and mikes, they spoke constantly to their opposite numbers in other cities, fiddling with the connections and praying their satellite uplinks wouldn’t fritz just before they went live.

Halovic wended his way through the muttering crowds to a relatively clear spot and brought out his own gear. The VCR came first, and he found a power strip with an open socket. He was rewarded with a bright green power light. Next came several grey metal junction boxes and black cabling. Hooking one end of a cable to the VCR, he carefully screwed the jack in, then payed the cable out, walking toward the aisle in the center of the room.