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 SUREhow 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, thinkingterror 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’CLOCKin 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 CHASEdidn’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.”
—
THEY TALKEDabout the documents from Ritter’s safe-deposit box and concluded that while there may have been illegal activity at Heracles, it wouldn’t directly help them with the Smalls investigation.
“I’d need a lot more background to even understand the documents. I mean, I know all the words, but I don’t know what they’re saying. If you know they shipped twenty cases of used/surplus full-auto SAWs, what does that mean? Is it illegal? I don’t know,” Rae said. SAWs, Squad Automatic Weapons, were belt-fed light machine guns. “The fact that Ritter saved the paper suggests there’s something wrong, else why would he save it? If it’s all legal, there wouldn’t be any difference between shipping a SAW and a grilled cheese sandwich.”
