The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,136

radios that sounded like an explosion. Now, from the NCTC, there was only silence.

The Lee Highway exit of the hotel was a right turn only. The Frenchwoman turned left instead. She evaded the oncoming cars, turned left onto North Lynn Street, and a few seconds later was racing across Key Bridge toward Georgetown. The FBI undercover SWAT and surveillance teams had no choice but to repeat the Frenchwoman’s reckless moves. Two vehicles spilled from the Lee Highway exit, two more into North Fort Myer Drive. By the time they reached Key Bridge, the Corolla was already turning onto M Street. It had no tracking beacon and no interior microphones. From the heights of the bridge, the FBI teams could see flashing red-and-blue lights streaking toward Georgetown.

62

LIBERTY CROSSING, VIRGINIA

GABRIEL OPENED ONE EYE, then, slowly, painfully, the other. He had lost consciousness, for how long he did not know—a few seconds, a few minutes, an hour or more. Nor could he fathom the attitude of his own body. He was submerged in a sea of debris, that much he knew, but he could not discern whether he was prone or supine, upright or topsy-turvy. He felt no undue pressure in his head, which he took as a good sign, though he was afraid he had lost the ability to hear. The last sound he could recall was the roar of the detonation and the whoosh-thump of the vacuum effect. The supersonic blast wave seemed to have scrambled his internal organs. He hurt everywhere—his lungs, his heart, his liver, everywhere.

He pushed with his hands, and the debris yielded. Through a fog of dust he glimpsed the exposed steel skeleton of the building and the severed arteries of network cables and electric wiring. Sparks rained down, as if from a Roman candle, and through a rip in the ceiling he could make out the handle of the Big Dipper. A cold November wind chilled him. A finch landed within his grasp, studied him dispassionately, and was gone again.

Gabriel swept aside more of the debris and, wincing, sat up. One of the kidney-shaped tables had come to rest across his legs. Lying next to him, motionless, dredged in dust, was a woman. Her face was pristine, save for a few small cuts from the flying glass. Her eyes were open and fixed in the thousand-yard stare of death. Gabriel recognized her; she was an analyst who worked at a pod near his. Jill was her name—or was it Jen? Her job was to scour the manifests of incoming flights for potential bad actors. She was a bright young woman, barely out of college, probably from a wholesome town somewhere in Iowa or Utah. She had come to Washington to help keep her country safe, thought Gabriel, and now she was dead.

He placed his hand lightly on her face and closed her eyes. Then he pushed away the table and rose unsteadily to his feet. Instantly, the shattered world of the Operations Floor began to spin. Gabriel placed his hands on his knees until the merry-go-round stopped. The right side of his head was warm and wet. Blood flowed into his eyes.

He wiped it away and returned to the window where he had seen the approaching truck. There were no bodies and very little debris on this side of the building; everything had been blown inward. Nor were there any windows or outer walls. The entire southern facade of the National Counterterrorism Center had been shorn away. Gabriel moved cautiously toward the edge of the precipice and looked down. In the forecourt was a deep crater, far deeper than the one that had been left outside the Weinberg Center in Paris, a meteor strike. The skyway connecting the NCTC to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was gone. So was the entire northern face of the building. Inside its shattered conference rooms and offices not a single light burned. A survivor waved to Gabriel from the cliff’s edge of an upper floor. Gabriel, not knowing what else to do, waved back.

The traffic on the Beltway had ground to a halt, white headlights on the inner loop, red taillights on the outer. Gabriel patted the front of his jacket and discovered he was still in possession of his mobile phone. He removed it and thumbed it into life. He still had service. He dialed Mikhail’s number and raised the phone to his ear, but there was only silence. Or maybe Mikhail was speaking and Gabriel