Page 21 of Midnight Secrets

This had the stink of a SpecOps operation all over it. Starting from knowing where all the security cameras were and blanking them out before the massacre.

Whoever had planned it had the right event. After Alex Delvaux had declared his candidacy, he would have been surrounded by secret service agents. They weren’t the best of the best, in Joe’s book. They weren’t as hardened as SEALs but that was because they operated mainly in the USA and not in hellholes the way SEALs did. But they would have certainly supplied better security than had been on hand at the Burrard Hotel.

Which had been, essentially, zilch. It wasn’t stated specifically but Joe knew how to read after-action reports. There had been the hotel security, which was pitiful, and ten agents from a private company. Joe checked the company out and he’d never heard of it. He’d heard of more or less every single important security company in the US and most operating throughout the world. The fact that he hadn’t heard of the outfit meant that it was either a super elite one or rank amateurs. Joe opted for door number two.

There was no way to interview any of the security force—whether the hotel’s or the private company’s—because they’d all died in the attack. Not one man from the security detail survived.

Very few survived, in fact, so there weren’t many eyewitness accounts. Maybe forty people including a congressional aide so traumatized he’d had to be sedated and was still in a psychiatric hospital.

Reading carefully, Joe was able to piece together a bare-bones timeline. He started with the recordings. Several major news networks and an even bigger number of bloggers with cell phones were recording the proceedings.

Early evening. 7:20 pm. Big hullabaloo in the hotel ballroom, thousands of excited people. Canned music in the background. A buffet against the wall with waiters standing behind it, white-gloved hands clasped in front of them, staring off in the distance, as if the goings-on at the podium had nothing to do with them.

About thirty people on the podium, including Alex Delvaux. His wife was there and two young boys. Isabel was on the sidelines, smiling, talking to someone in the audience. The older brother was missing. Jack, his name was, Joe remembered reading. He didn’t recognize many of the others on the crowded podium. Then a woman stepped away and Joe recognized a face in the second row. Hector Something. Hector…Blake. He’d been around for as long as Joe remembered. Had even been a Secretary of Something. A Senator, too. Maybe twice.

He saw Isabel frown, look around, step away from the podium with a cell phone to her ear.

The crowd was chanting, “Del-vaux, Del-vaux, Del-vaux!” Alex Delvaux stepped to the microphone, smiling, hands up, patting the air. Calming people down. It took him a quarter of an hour as they kept getting revved up, over and over again.

Finally, there was a little quiet. Delvaux bent his head down to the podium mike. There was a feedback whine and Delvaux stepped back quickly. The whine stopped and he stepped forward again. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome! Thank you for joining us on this historic evening. We’re going to shake things up!”

The crowd went wild, jumping up and down, most of them holding up cell phones to capture the moment.

Delvaux held back a moment, grinning, letting the crowd have its moment.

Joe rarely paid attention to politics and politicians. He considered it all a rigged game, like pro wrestling, only less fun. He had to admit, though, there was real excitement in the air. He leaned forward to study Delvaux. Handsome but not too handsome. The lines in his face showed that he smiled more than he frowned. Charisma came off the man in waves.

So this was Isabel’s father.

“I know some of you are thinking of the excellent buffet tables behind you—” Raucous laughter. “But first there are some things we have to say, about us as a people and about our country. We feel?—”

The lights went out. Gasps, a few snickers, as if this was planned. There was light coming from the cells, a little forest of them held high in invisible hands. Some people started shouting.

And then the cells blinked to black and the camera feed cut out.

The screen showed nothing—a blank black.

There were no recordings of the Massacre, at least none that had come to light. When police and CSI units came after the shooting and killing was done, after the explosives had been set off, after the attackers fled and disappeared completely from the earth, they found candles that had been lit by staff still burning and a few flashlights, so there had been some light.

The killers had had night vision. They had to have had night vision. You didn’t set out to do mass murder by first killing the lights, without being able to see.

A few eyewitness reports had leaked out from what was still an ongoing police investigation. They all reported that the attackers had been dressed in shiny black head to foot and had worn balaclavas. They had shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’Over and over.

Jihadists changing the course of American history, killing another Kennedy. Another vigorous young leader who embodied hope and energy.

Joe was going to ask for the CSI photos and if he didn’t get them through his friend Nick Mancino, a former teammate and now in the FBI’s elite HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team, he’d get Felicity to hack into the FBI files. He wanted to see the results of the Massacre firsthand.

He wanted to see what Isabel had survived.

She was mentioned in the reports. They’d tried to interview her several times, the first time after she woke up from surgery having suffered a broken clavicle and cracked hipbone and a very bad concussion in the explosion. And many times after that. She remembered nothing. Retrograde amnesia.

Ah, honey, Joe thought in sorrow. He hadn’t been bugged by anyone after he’d woken up from surgery. Metal and Jacko had taken turns sitting by his bedside and then had arranged to have him flown out to Portland on an ASI private jet.

He hadn’t had any worries other than getting better. He hadn’t been given the news upon waking that his entire family was dead.

How horrible it must have been for her. Even worse than horrible because of the concussion and amnesia. The phone call had saved her life. Apparently the explosion had tossed her into a section of the ballroom just past the area that had totally collapsed.

Amnesia. So she couldn’t even remember what had happened. All she knew was that she woke up severely injured and her entire family was gone.

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