Designated Targets

The chief petty officer was nearing the end of his observation shift when the FBI agent interrupted Hoover and Tolson. The others were sleeping, and he sent a soft ping to their earbuds to alert them.

The team was located in adjoining suites at the Gulfstream, in a separate wing of the pink U-shaped hotel to the director and his “longtime companion.” Rogas was bunking with marine Corporal Harriet “the Chariot” Klausner, while in the next room a fellow SEAL, Chief Petty Officer Bryan Cockerill, had teamed up with a marine Corporal Shelley Horton, who’d done three years undercover in a previous life on the Baltimore PD. They were posing as servicemen on leave with their wives.

It hadn’t been possible to get a room near Hoover. They were all kept vacant. But the fucking moron stayed in the same luxury suite every time. So Horton and Cockerill had rented it a few days earlier and installed all the microcams before checking out for a short, fictitious scuba-diving trip down in the Keys.

Rogas had no idea where Kolhammer got his intelligence from, but it was good.

Hoover took the exact room the admiral had said he would on the day he was supposed to.

“Admirals”—the Navy SEAL smiled to himself—“is there anything they can’t do?”

“S’up bitch?” asked Klausner, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes as she appeared at his shoulder in the darkened room.

“Dunno,” he said. “Some Bureau dude just fronted Tolson with a story about bombs going off somewhere. You might want to check out Fleetnet if you can get a link.”

The other two roomies, Horton and Cockerill, appeared from next door. There was a door between the suites, which Rogas assumed was normally locked, until some rich mom and dad needed to rent separate space for their kids.

It was late, and the only light in the room came from the screen Rogas was watching. The hotel room was rank with the smell of four human beings who hadn’t been outside for a long time. Room service trays and discarded junk food artifacts lay everywhere, threatening to pile up into a couple of serious garbage drifts. The technical specs for the gig had been minimal. The surveillance rigs and just two data slates to display the take. They needed to be able to break the observation post down for a quick exit.

Rogas waved Horton and Cockerill over to the table where he had one slate running live vision from the targets’ room.

“What’s going on?” asked Horton.

“Bombings or some shit,” said Klausner, who was powering up the other slate to send a query to Fleetnet.

“Anything else?”

“Well,” said Rogas. “Edgar and Clyde have been having a tiff, and Clyde’s been hitting the bottle a little too hard. Edgar thinks he should wear that spanky little kimono he bought for him—”

“The blue one?” asked Horton. “I like that one. I reckon Clyde looks really edible in that.”

“Well, he’s just sitting around in his fuckin’ crusties for now,” said Rogas. “I thought they were going to have a real catfight over it.”

“Talk about your fuckin’ funniest home videos,” grunted Cockerill.

The mission boss was playing with touch-screen controls while Cocky spoke, trying to isolate the audio take from the agent at the door.

“Got it!” Klausner called out. “Early reports of half a dozen soft target bombings in New York. No details yet.”

“Shit,” said Horton.

They watched as the two men on screen argued with each other. They dismissed the agent who brought the bad news.

“We have to get back there now,” said Tolson after the man had left. “We’ll get the blame for this.”

Rogas waited for Hoover to reply, but an unusual stillness had come over the FBI director.

“We’ll see,” he said at last.

Rogas looked at his watch. They were due to send another data burst in ninety minutes. He took less than a heartbeat to make his decision.

“Cocky, start compressing the last six hours’ feed for a flash traffic burst. Kolhammer needs to see this now. Shelly, let’s get this fucking pigsty policed up. I think we’re going to be on the move soon.”

If they were going back to Washington, Rogas would need to send an alert ahead to his advance team.

They needed to finish wiring up Hoover’s house and to try to get a surveillance roach into his office.

Again Rogas had no idea how Kolhammer hoped to achieve that.

“Admirals . . .” He smiled.

NEW YORK

Julia and Dan were in Midtown on a cold autumn evening, walking to dinner and arguing as they huddled in overcoats: his olive drab, hers black leather. The temperature had begun dropping away an hour earlier, and a gray drizzle was threatening to turn to sleet. Dan’s mood matched the weather. He wasn’t happy about her mixing with the wrong crowd, which in his opinion seemed to account for just about everyone who had ever associated with Slim Jim Davidson.

“If those federal agents were on his case, they probably had good reason to be,” he insisted.