in on three sides by high brick walls. It was impossible to
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decipher the building’s original purpose. Maybe it had been a
stable, back when Union Station’s freight had been hauled away
by horses. Maybe later it was updated with new windows and
used as a trucking depot after the horses faded away. Maybe it
had served time as an office. It was impossible to tell.
It housed fifty homeless people every night. They were
woken early every morning and given breakfast and turned out
on the streets. Then the fifty cots were stacked and stored and
the floor was washed and the air was misted with disinfectant.
Metal tables and chairs were carried in and placed where the
beds had been. Lunch was available every day, and dinner, and
then the reverse conversion to a dormitory took place at nine
every evening.
But this day was different. Thanksgiving Day was always
different, and this year it was more different than usual. Wake
up call happened a little earlier and breakfast was served a little
faster. The overnighters were shown the door a full half-hour
before normal, which was a double blow to them because cities
are notoriously quiet on Thanksgiving Day and panhandling
receipts are dismal. The floor was washed more thoroughly
than usual and more disinfectant was sprayed into the air. The
tables were positioned more exactly, the chairs were lined up
more precisely, more volunteers were on. hand, and all of them
were wearing fresh white sweatshirts with the benefactor’s
name brightly printed in red.
The first Secret Service agents to arrive were the line-of-sight
team. They had a large-scale city surveyor’s map and a telescopic
sight removed from a sniper rifle. One agent walked
through every step that Armstrong was scheduled to take.
Every separate pace he would stop and turn round and squint
through the scope and call out every window and every rooftop
he could see. Because if he could see a rooftop or a window, a
potential marksman on that rooftop or in that window could
see him. The agent with the map would identify the building
concerned and check the scale and calculate the range. Anything under seven hundred feet he marked in black.
But it was a good location. The only available sniper nests
were on the roofs of the abandoned five-storey warehouses
opposite. The guy with the map finished up with a straight line
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of just five black crosses, nothing more. He wrote checked with
scope, clear daylight, 0845 hrs, all suspect locations recorded across the bottom of the map and signed his name and added
the date. The agent with the scope countersigned and the map
was rolled and stored in the back of a department Suburban,
awaiting Froelich’s arrival.
Next on scene was a convoy of police vans with five separate
canine units in them. One unit cleared the shelter. Two more
entered the warehouses. The last two were explosives hunters
who checked the surrounding streets in all directions on a four
hundred-yard radius. Beyond four hundred yards, the maze of
streets meant there were too many potential access routes to
check, and therefore too many to bomb with any realistic
chance of success. As soon as a building or a street was
pronounced safe a D.C. patrolman took up station on foot. The
sky was still clear and the sun was still out. It gave an illusion of
warmth. It kept grousing to a minimum.
By nine thirty the shelter was the epicentre of a quarter of a
square mile of secure territory. D.C. cops held the perimeter on
foot and in cars and there were better than fifty more loose in
the interior. They made up the majority of the local population.
The city was still quiet. Some of the shelter inhabitants were
hanging around. There was nowhere productive to go, and they
knew from experience that to be early in the lunch line was
better than late. Politicians didn’t understand portion control,
and pickings could be getting slim after the first thirty minutes.
Froelich arrived at ten o’clock exactly, driving a Suburban
with Reacher and Neagley riding with her. Stuyvesant was right
behind in a second Suburban. Behind him were four more