CHAPTER
53
KNOX HAD BEEN sitting in a car she had requisitioned from INSCOM at Fort Belvoir. While she had told Puller that she needed to report in and start filling out voluminous paperwork, her real purpose was to stay behind and then follow Donovan Carter when he left the facility.
He had a black Town Car and a driver. And Knox could see the man accompanying him.
It was Blair Sullivan, the internal security man who had gotten so heated about their investigation of Susan Reynolds.
As they exited out of the DTRA complex, Knox fell in behind them. They got on Interstate 95 and Knox kept a few car lengths back. They exited onto Interstate 395 and headed north toward D.C.
Knox had no idea if this would lead to anything, but there was a chance and she felt she had to take it. She had nothing to lose. They exited at Shirlington and she followed. A few minutes later the car pulled to a stop in front of a small outdoor mall of upscale eateries and shops. The driver parked the Town Car, and Carter and Sullivan went into one of the restaurants.
“Great,” said Knox out loud to herself. “An early dinner. Just my luck. And I can’t go in because unless they suddenly go blind, they’re going to see me.”
She backed into an open space across the street and waited. She listened to the radio and answered emails but continually kept her gaze roaming over the street. She was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel when a white van pulled in next to where the Town Car was parked. A burly guy opened the passenger door and in doing so clipped the side of the Town Car.
The window of the Town Car came down and Carter’s driver stuck his head out. Knox could hear him yelling at the guy. The guy yelled back.
The driver got out and the two men stood toe to toe, still yelling and jabbing fingers in each other’s chests.
Knox was hoping this was not going to escalate into something bad, because she was pretty sure the driver was armed. Her gaze drifted to a teenager rolling down the sidewalk on a skateboard. He had long curly hair, a ball cap turned backward, and was wearing a bulky hoodie, jeans torn at the knee and thigh and sneakers the size of small dogs with no shoelaces. He was riding low, and then he attempted a complicated jump and fell on his ass right next to the Town Car, disappearing from her line of sight.
Knox’s gaze drifted back to the two men. They were still arguing, only now Carter’s man was showing his creds to the burly guy. She hoped that would put an end to the confrontation.
Knox shifted back to the kid, who was rising up next to the Town Car. He dusted off his pants and looked sheepishly around as he gripped his board.
Not such a hotshot on the board, thought Knox.
As he dropped his board, stepped on it, and pushed off he passed by the two men. Then he gathered speed, turned the corner in a tight curve, and was gone from her view.
The burly guy climbed back into the van, still scowling and yelling, and the van reversed out of the space just as the restaurant’s door opened and Carter and Sullivan emerged. His driver yelled one more thing at the van as it pulled away, honking its horn. The driver turned and saw Carter and Sullivan and hurried to open the car door for the DTRA head.
Knox pulled out her phone and called Puller. He answered on the second ring.
She told him what she was doing, and also where she was. He replied to her information in a few succinct sentences.
“Roger that,” she said. “But I think that—”
As if someone had pushed a secret button in her brain, Knox started to piece together what she had just seen.
No, not what she had just seen.
What had really just happened.
She heard Puller say, “Knox? Knox?”
She didn’t even hear him. What she had just seen was a diversion.
The guy in the van bumping the Town Car on purpose.
A kid who wasn’t a kid sailing by on a skateboard while the driver was distracted by the van guy.
Then a planned fall that allowed the kid access underneath the Town Car out of sight of anyone.
Then the kid had disappeared.
As if on cue the burly guy had given up on the confrontation and the van had raced off.
She snapped back from these thoughts and saw that Sullivan and Carter were in the car.
The driver started it up.
Still holding the phone, Knox kicked open her car door, leapt out, and started to sprint across the street.
“Get out of the car!” she screamed. “Get out of the car! There’s a—”
The ground moved violently under her feet, the pavement seemed to whipsaw like a snake on crack. Everything took on the elements of a world reduced to slow motion. She staggered, braced herself for what she knew was coming and could do absolutely nothing about. Visions of Mosul came roaring vividly back to her. Sitting in an armored Humvee one second. Lying far away in the dirt another second later and having no idea how she had gotten there, not knowing whether people were alive or dead, whether she would die here too. Whether her legs would ever function again.
All of this took a millionth of a second to pass through her mind. And that was good, because even with that, she was out of time.
She had looked away at the last moment, and it was a good thing she did. Looking directly at an explosion of sufficient magnitude could blind a person. But it didn’t really matter. People close enough to be blinded by such a flash didn’t usually live anyway.
Her last conscious thought was a surprising one to her.
Sorry, Puller. It’s up to you now.
The concussive force of the explosion lifted her right out of her shoes, throwing her twenty feet through the air like a pellet from a slingshot, until she smashed against the plate glass window of a linen shop. She managed to cover her head with her hands right before impact as her phone flew from her, landed in the street, and broke apart. Knox ended up on the floor of the shop in a heap of limbs.
The Town Car had been obliterated. What was left of the three men inside was no longer recognizable. The explosion had shattered windows up and down the street. People were lying on the sidewalks, bloodied, battered, unconscious, and some of them would never be waking up.
Others were moaning, groaning, and staggering around. Some were in shock, others badly injured, and others, though unhurt, could only stare in horror at what had happened.
It was like a street in Baghdad or Kabul, not an affluent area a few miles from Washington, D.C.
Car alarms triggered by the blast were going off up and down the street. People were running now, some toward the blast site, others away from it, no doubt terrified that more explosions were going to take place. A police officer who had been pulling security guard duty in a jewelry shop did his best to help the injured and direct people to a safer area.
Inside the linen shop Knox was lying facedown on the floor in a pile of glass shards, covered with sheets and pillows that she had crashed into after cracking through the window. Her eyes were closed, her breathing was tight and shallow, and the blood was flowing down her face.
In another minute the sirens started to wail, people started to scream louder, survivors tried to help the injured and the dying. Then there were the dead. They had come here for a meal, or to do some shopping or run an errand, unaware that it would be the last time they would ever do any of those things.
Inside the shop, Veronica Knox didn’t move. The blood just continued to flow down her face.