The Enemy Within Read Free

life as part of the Benicia Army Arsenal. Since the Army closed its base back in the early sixties, the warehouse had changed hands more than a dozen times, moving from owner to owner and landlord to landlord in a dizzying, confusing procession. All of them had valued its sheer size and easy access to the freeway, railroad, and waterfront. None of them had valued Building 405 enough to spend much time or money on maintenance. From the outside, the place looked more like a ruin than a going concern a heap of flaking, cracked concrete walls covered by moss, rust stains from an old tin roof, and spray-painted graffiti.
    FBI Special Agent Michael Flynn stopped at the entrance to the cavernous warehouse to watch his investigative team at work. More than a dozen agents were scattered throughout the building, poking and prying everywhere with gloved hands as they looked for evidence. Others were busy stringing yellow police tape around areas marked for closer inspection. Camera flashes went off in a rapid, uneven sequence as photographers recorded every aspect of their search.
    Flynn followed every move intently, fighting hard to control the fury surging through him. The tall, grim-faced FBI agent had just come from the explosion site at the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-four hours after the bomb blast, firemen and forensics specialists were still prying charred bodies out of mangled cars strewn across the span. More than one hundred innocent men, women, and children were dead. Dozens more were critically injured all of them badly burned or maimed by flying chunks of steel. The bridge itself would be closed for days, both by the investigation and by the need to make sure the fires set by the tanker explosion hadn’t affected its structural integrity.
    He shook his head. Over the years he’d seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of murder scenes. But he’d never seen anything like that tangled, twisted slaughterhouse on the Golden Gate Bridge.
    Flynn wanted the bastards responsible for this massacre. He wanted them more than he’d wanted any murdering thug he’d hunted in his twenty-six years with the Bureau. His hands clenched into fists.
    He looked up as his top aide broke off a hushed conversation with some of the other agents and hurried over. “What’ve you got for me, Tommy?”
    “Plenty.” Special Agent Thomas Koenig nodded toward one of the work benches surrounded by yellow tape. “We found some cut strands of detonator wire over there. And the chemical sniffers are picking up definite traces of plastic explosive. There and all over this dump.”
    Flynn grimaced. “So this was the bomb factory?”
    “Yeah,” Koenig said flatly. “The way I figure it is this: They popped that truck driver out near the highway.” He pointed to the two massive ramps that led directly from the street into the building’s interior. “Then they drove the tanker right up one of those ramps, parked it, and pulled down those steel doors. After that, they had all the time in the world to wire it up for the big show.” He shrugged. “No muss. No fuss.”
    cshit,,’
    “Exactly.” Koenig looked up at him closely. “Get anything besides a couple of John Doe stiffs out of that wrecked Sentra?”
    Flynn nodded. Connecting the smashed-up Nissan they’d found at the bottom of the Marin cliffs with the bomb blast and dead CHP officer hadn’t required brilliant detective work, just common sense. “Weapons: a nine mil and a Czech machine pistol. They’re on the way to ballistics. Plus, we found a coil of wire and about a half-kilo block of plastic explosive in the trunk.”
    Koenig whistled softly. “Curiouser and curiouser.” He frowned. “Think somebody else was out there yesterday morning cutting away a few loose ends?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Sir!” One of the agents manning their bank of laptop computers and secure phones waved him over. “A fax just came in from D.C. They’ve got positive IDs on both those bodies.”
    Flynn arched a