Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent the evening in Bob’s room, plowing through the Xerox copies of the documents found in Ritter’s safe-deposit box, as well as the encrypted documents found on his laptop. The docs mostly consisted of bills of lading, along with handwritten notes by McCoy about the contents of the shipments and their recipients. There were also photographs of these people, men in military dress, or partial military dress, which appeared to have been taken surreptitiously with cell phones.
They quit at ten o’clock, and Lucas hadn’t been back in his room for more than the time needed to pee, take off his shoes, and turn on the television, when he heard a knock, but across the stub hall, the room he’d had the first night.
He picked up the PPQ on his way across the room, eased up to the door, plucked the spitball out of the peephole, and peeked out. A dark-haired woman was facing the other door. He couldn’t see much of her because she was short, no more than five-four.
He popped open the door with his left hand; he kept the PPQ in his right, turned away from the door—he didn’t want to frighten her if she was a hotel employee. Startled, she turned quickly, and he realized that she had no mouth or nose, only black eyes and eyebrows. About the time he realized she was wearing a military desert camo face mask, he also saw her long-barreled pistol coming up, a pistol with a wicked-looking silencer, and he slammed the door, and fell on his back, as the first slugs smashed through it.
He rolled to his right, toward the bathroom door, and fired off a single shot, and three fast shots smashed back at him through the hall door, but now he was in the bathroom and he fired another shot through the door. The incoming shots were loud, silencers reducing the sound of the blasts but not eliminating it. His outgoing shots, on the other hand, were deafening. The incoming shots stopped, and a door slammed, and he thought she was probably running.
He got on his knees, ready to fire, cracked the door, saw that the stub hall was empty. He got to his feet and took three fast steps down the hall and, as he did, heard perhaps fifteen full-auto sound-suppressed shots in the main hallway, then three fast, noisy pistol shots, another brrrp of full-auto, and then sudden silence.
He cracked the door to the outer hallway, and Bob shouted, “Lucas! Lucas!”
Lucas shouted back, “You guys okay?”
“We’re okay. She’s down the stairs.”
Lucas stepped into the outer hallway and saw Bob, barefoot, in a T-shirt and white boxer shorts. He was pointing down the hall, and Lucas looked past him toward the exit sign. Seconds later, Rae, wrapped in a bathrobe, burst into the hall with a gun in her hand, saw the two men, and shouted, “Where’d he go?”
Bob and Lucas shouted at the same time, “Woman. Down the stairs.”
Rae and Bob started running toward the stairwell, and Lucas, running behind them, shouted, “No, no, no, Bob, stop!”
Bob and Rae kept going, and Bob shouted over his shoulder, “She’ll get away.”
“Stop. Stop, goddamnit!”
Bob and Rae, now uncertain, slowed as Lucas caught up to them, and said, “You really want to go into a concrete stairwell with an assassin who has a machine gun?”
Bob and Rae looked at each other, and Rae said, “Maybe not.”
“She’s gone anyway,” Lucas said. “She had a suppressed pistol and a machine gun. She’s some kind of pro, and she’d have a getaway set up. Let’s find out if anybody’s hurt, see if the security people have any video.”
“And maybe call your man Russell and see who’s gonna pay for all this shit,” Rae said, waving down the hall.
Lucas looked, saw the carpeting covered with plaster dust and soundproofing, the walls scarred with bullet holes, with more holes in the wall at the end of the hallway. A man poked his head out of a room, saw three people with guns, slammed the door.
Bob was talking fast, riding the adrenaline wave. “She had an MP9. It’s a rare gun, I’ve only seen one before this. She had it on a sling under her jacket. I saw it coming up and jumped back, and she hosed down the door. I fired three shots down the hall without looking, hoping to hit her.” He looked down at the carpet. “No blood. When she fired that second burst, I heard her kick the door open . . .”
“Got lucky,” Lucas said. “She thought I was in my original room . . .”
“Gotta call the cops right now,” Rae said, “or they’re going to show up with their own machine guns, and we’re the only people around they might think worth shooting.”
“Right,” Lucas said. “Let’s do that.”
Another door popped open, a woman looked down the hall, and shouted, “What happened?”
“You okay?” Lucas called.
She was. Bob put on some pants, and he and Lucas ran down the hall, knocking on doors, checking to see if anyone had been hurt. No one had been.
* * *
—
LUCAS WAS NEVER SURE how many D.C. cops showed up, but it looked to be about thirty, right on the heels of the on-duty security man. The full-auto was what had drawn them in, thinking terror attack. They’d gotten a couple of dozen reports of the shooting before they even got the call from Rae, who told the 911 operator that there were marshals on the scene and, as far as they knew, nobody was injured.
Lucas called Forte, who listened to Lucas’s story, then said, “This is now officially out of control. This is now officially nuts. This is now officially about six hundred pounds of paperwork.”
“Get to it tomorrow,” Lucas said. “Right now, it looks like we’ll be up half the night with the D.C. cops.”
“And the FBI and DHS. You can’t shoot up the Watergate pie without getting a whole lot of fingers in it.”
* * *
—
AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, Lucas, Bob, and Rae gathered in Lucas’s room, and Lucas said, “She was wearing a camouflage face mask; I’ve seen them in pictures of soldiers in Iraq. All I could see were her eyes, and her body, but I think I’ve seen her before.”
Rae: “Where?”
“That girl in the photo at Ritter’s place. The one where she’s turning away because somebody’s taking her picture.”
“You think . . . she’s with Heracles?”
“I don’t know, but she knew what she was doing,” Lucas said. “If she’d come to the right door, I’d be dead right now.”
Bob nodded, and said to Rae, “You know what that would mean? No more Business Class, no more suites. We’d be back at Motel 6.”
“Let’s not even think about that,” Rae said, shivering, wrapping her arms around herself. “Tourist Class—the Walk of Shame.”
“We’re not there yet,” Lucas said. “But I’m worried.”
* * *
—
JANE CHASE didn’t call in the morning—she’d warned them she might not. Lucas, Bob, and Rae were rousted out of bed at nine o’clock to be interviewed by three Homeland Security guys, accompanied by a D.C. cop and two FBI agents. They were gone by noon, having extracted everything that Lucas, Bob, and Rae knew by ten o’clock but insisting on going over and over the same territory for the next two hours.
“Excuse me, but those guys wanted it to be a terror attack,” Rae said.
“If you don’t have the occasional terror attack, what are those guys going to do for jobs?” Bob asked.
“There you go,” Lucas said.
At one o’clock, Lucas called Chase’s office number, but nobody picked up, and he left a long message about the firefight at the Watergate. They got sandwiches at a Subway, and the three ate lunch in Lucas’s room.
“You see the reporters out there last night?” Rae asked. “We’re national news everywhere. We’re probably all over CNN and Fox right now.”
Lucas turned on the television, surfed the news channels, and on the third click found a reporter, standing outside the Watergate, talking to a woman who’d either seen or heard something. “They were shouting in Arabic, clear as day, Allahu Akbar . . .”
“Aw, man,” Rae said, and Lucas turned it off.
“Homeland Security is handling it,” Lucas said. “Or their PR department is.”
* * *
—