“Believe it or not,” Jack said, “we’re not many miles from the center of US government—Capitol Hill and the White House.”
“Expensive homes. Zillions of tourists. Massive security presence protecting it all. Not at all easy to attack directly,” she said. “But easy enough to take out from a distance with an atomic bomb.”
Jack rested his wrist on the top of the steering wheel as they drove slowly past a whitewashed brick building with plywood over the windows. “You’re right. It’s a terrifyingly brilliant plan. Most terrorists just want to kill people at familiar places and take out landmarks. These guys want to take out an entire city.”
Angela gazed out at places that looked like they had already been bombed. A lot of people had long ago fled the area, leaving haunted shells of buildings. But there were still lots of dangerous-looking thugs hanging out on the street corners, on steps, and in alleyways. She saw drug deals going down. She had seen so many of those growing up she could spot them in her sleep.
As she glanced down a narrow alley with overflowing Dumpsters, she saw people sitting on the landings of iron fire escapes. All up the five flights, laundry hung on the iron railings and in the narrow spaces between buildings like colorful flags. Lots of innocent people lived in these areas as well. They didn’t dare to come out much, and when they did, they were often prey.
She saw no-trespassing signs nailed up on dirty white doors in a row of abandoned homes beside railroad tracks. Homeless people were sleeping on the porches of those derelict homes, their collections of blankets and cardboard piled up protectively around them. Many had their belongings piled high in shopping carts parked nearby, like cars parked in front of homes.
“Any idea if we’re close?” Jack asked.
She could understand his impatience. He was risking everything on her word.
“Sorry,” she said. “I recognize places, not distances.”
“We have to be close. We’re going to be at the Capitol Building soon.”
Angela pointed. “Turn right down here.”
One of the abandoned brick buildings had a big white skull painted on the side of it. Her memory—Cassiel’s memory—fit it perfectly. Cassiel had looked at that crudely painted skull.
The area around various buildings looked like garbage dumps. Angela saw a small plastic pedal car as well as other broken toys sticking out of the rubble. It reminded her of the way she had played outside her mother’s trailer when she had been little, making mud pies, picking weeds and putting them in empty beer cans like flowers in a vase, completely oblivious to the poverty, drugs, and crime going on around her. To her, it was simply home and completely normal to walk around winos who tried to entice her from their lawn chairs in front of their trailers, or to hide from scary men under blue tarps covering cars that didn’t run and never would again.
The children who pedaled around on those toys were the innocents who would be vaporized under a mushroom cloud if she didn’t stop that bomb from going off.
As they drove down the street, they began to encounter buildings that looked like giant, stacked building blocks. The blocky structures formed a variety of shapes. It was once a bustling business area.
“Stop the car!” she yelled.
Jack flinched from her scream but put on the brakes, slowing rapidly without squealing the tires.
He looked over at her. “What?”
“Pull over and then slowly back up along the curb.”
He did what she wanted without knowing why.
“Okay stop. Now, roll down your window.”
Jack gave her a questioning look as he held down the window button. “What—”
“Lean back,” she told him, her focus elsewhere.
Angela pulled out her gun, holding it in both hands across in front of him as she aimed out the open window.
It made a soft, muffled pop when she pulled the trigger, along with the metallic sound of the slide cycling to eject the shell and chamber the next round. The small ejected brass casing hit the windshield and bounced along the top of the dash.
Across the street, a man, looking like a puppet whose strings had been cut, dropped straight down. Some of the other people standing down the street didn’t even notice.
“Drive,” she told him as she pulled her gun back.
SIXTY-FIVE
“What the hell?” Jack said.
She looked out the back window to see three men approach the man on the ground. They looked all around, then bent down to go through the dead man’s pockets.
“It was a lookout,” Angela told him. “We’re close.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, his name was Jesus, one of the lookouts they have posted at street level.” Angela pointed. “Up there. See that building with the dark, octagonal, three-story tower at the corner? Turn left there.”
Jack turned the corner. The street became more than a street. It had been used by commercial trucks to load and unload at the buildings rising up at the edge of narrow sidewalks. Some of the buildings had roll-up metal doors with small loading docks. Rusted metal railings kept people from falling in the loading pits. Wooden pallets lay on some of the docks. In other places pallets were leaned up against corners of buildings.
Chain-link fences with barbed wire on top spanned the gaps between some of the buildings. Those canyons between vertical walls were filled with years of accumulated trash.
All the buildings, docks, railings, roll-up doors—everything—had been hit by scribble monkeys. Buildings seemed to melt together in endless gang graffiti, all the tags proclaiming affiliation and territory, or boasting threats.
The tall building on the left at the far corner of the block was different from the others all around it. It was made up of a gridwork of cement columns and beams, with brick filling in the centers and forming the main part of the walls. The brick squares had windows in long rows up high that looked to be for light and ventilation, not for a view. Higher up, the building’s walls were set back, and were all brick as it rose a number of stories more.
A vertical sign attached at the corner of the building said STILTON. The letters had once been filled with rows of lightbulbs, now all missing. She didn’t see that sign in Cassiel’s memories, but she saw the rest of the building. He had gone in and out from a loading dock in an alley of sorts.
“Go left at the end of the block,” she said.
Jack took the left at the corner with the Stilton sign and then took the next one when she told him to.
“What are we doing?” he asked. “We’re starting to drive around in circles.”
“The bomb is in the Stilton Building,” she said.
Jack craned his neck to look back over his left shoulder. “Damn.”
She had him turn the car around and drive around the block again, checking for lookouts and to be on the same side of the street for a better view of the building and for her to get a better shot if she needed one.
“Did you notice where the lookouts are?” she asked.
“Yes, at that blind alley with a loading dock at the back end.”
“Right.” Angela let out a deep breath. “Well, this is it.”
He shot her a sidelong glance. “This had damn well better work,” he muttered. “From here a nuke would take out the government.”
She nodded absently, thinking instead about the enormity of what was about to happen, the magnitude of everything resting on her shoulders. It seemed insane, but at the same time she knew she was right that this was the only sane course of action that could stop it from happening.
As they went around the building again, a DC police car drove slowly past, both black cops looking everything over for any sign of trouble. They had no idea that the Stilton Building they were passing was filled with trouble. The cop car drove on down the street and eventually turned a corner in the distance.