The man pushed him forward with his shoulder, but he kept walking in stride, and he didn’t even look his way. Softly the clean-shaven man said, “Hello, Max. In my right hand is a knife with a seven-inch blade. Keep moving along quietly or I’ll drive it through your back and into your lung.”
Ohlhauser’s eyes went wide, and instinctively he slowed, but the man in the raincoat kept moving, nudging him onward through the lunchtime crowd with another bump of his shoulder. Ohlhauser started walking again, complying even if he did not yet comprehend, and he looked down at the man’s right hand. It was mostly hidden by the cuff of his raincoat, but the glint of steel protruded just an inch between the man’s bent fingers.
Ohlhauser said softly, “What . . . What do you want?”
“I just want to talk. Keep looking straight ahead. Not at me.”
“Who are you?” Max’s own voice had lowered several decibels, to match that of the man talking to him.
The man in the raincoat smiled a little. He seemed surprisingly calm as far as Max was concerned, especially considering the man was, apparently, executing some sort of an armed confrontation in broad daylight. Raincoat man said, “Tomorrow morning you’ll be the biggest talking head on all the news shows, and this time you’ll actually have something to talk about.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re a smart guy, Max. You’ll figure it out.”
Ohlhauser walked on a moment, still in the middle of the crowd, still with the raincoat man less than a foot away. After a wheezing gasp he said, “Violator?”
“Keep moving. There are four men following you. If they see me, I’m fucked, which means you’re fucked, because I’ll gut you like a fat fish. Got it?”
“Please. I want you to understand, I didn’t have anything to do with—”
“Not now, Max. We’re going to take the escalator down into the Metro. You go first, I’m right behind you.”
Max Ohlhauser did as he was told, veering off the sidewalk and towards one of the entrances to the Metro Center station. Together the two men took the escalator down.
—
JSOC unit commander Dakota drove a black Suburban while his teammate, call sign Harley, sat in the front passenger’s seat, hunched over a laptop displaying navigational information, as well as a constant array of images of the streets around them.
The twelve-man JSOC team was split up into two-man teams today. The two pairs who’d spent the evening watching over Hanley’s house were sleeping off their long night’s shift, which left four teams of two, each in a different vehicle, each in a different sector of the District.
Jordan Mayes had called Dakota two hours earlier and asked him to vector one of the teams closer to Max Ohlhauser’s office, and to hold position in the neighborhood. Mayes didn’t want anyone to actually tail the former CIA attorney. The head of the JSOC special mission unit cell immediately tasked himself to Ohlhauser’s area, along with a teammate. It was a low probability callout because no one expected Gentry to be just idly wandering the streets outside of Ohlhauser’s office, but until Suzanne Brewer and her people at the TOC got some better lead, Dakota figured he might as well give it a shot.
There were thousands of people walking and driving around the heart of D.C. near the White House, so it was a good thing Dakota and Harley didn’t have to use their own eyeballs to hunt for the target. Instead they had mounted a state-of-the-art digital camera on the front grill of the GMC Yukon XL, and the camera scanned the entire street in a 120-degree arc, taking in all the facial recognition data it could pull from passersby, and feeding it into the computer.
While Dakota drove a crisscrossing pattern in a three-block radius of Ohlhauser’s place of business, Harley’s job was to sit in the passenger’s seat and watch the laptop. Every second new faces were analyzed by the software as the computer searched the streets.
It was good technology under the care of hardworking and well-trained men, but even though they’d been at it for a half hour so far, they’d come up empty. They’d not had a single hit—not even a false alarm.
Dakota was frustrated, but he was committed to the search, so he kept his patrol up. He planned on making a right at the next intersection, then heading back in the direction of the center of his surveillance zone. Dakota and Harley both assumed Ohlhauser was sitting in his office in the center of their search pattern, and they had no clue he was, instead, walking down the street just in front of them as they headed west on G approaching the 12th Street NW intersection.
Harley had barely said a word in the past fifteen minutes, but he called out in a loud voice just as Dakota flipped his turn signal lever.
“Got a hit, boss!”
Dakota turned off the signal as he looked towards his partner in surprise. “Where?”