The Golden Shield of IBF Read Online Free PDF Page A

the U.S. Attorney so that you can grandstand and try apprehending the suspect on your own is irresponsible conduct that we’ll discuss quite seriously after this is over. If the suspect uses his device and lives are lost, it’ll be on your head, Garrison, and yours, too, Sutton. The same if we lose him.”
    Wisnewski snorted again.
    The spare magazines for Garrison’s brace of SIG P-220 .45s were checked, both guns already secured in their shoulder holsters. Something he hadn’t been taught at the FBI Academy at Quantico but had been taught by some old friends who’d gone professionally armed all their adult lives was that the best way to disguise the presence of a gun carried in a shoulder holster was to carry two guns of identical or similar size in a double shoulder holster. This equalized the bulges.
    Garrison stood up. He was as ready as he could get, armed to the teeth and a wire under his shirt. Thank God, he thought, that the wire didn’t have to be taped on, because that meant shaving his chest or waiting for the inevitable pain of removing body hair along with the tape.
    Criswell asked a reasonable question. “How are you going to try finding this guy out of all these people?”
    Garrison answered, “I got down here for a little bit last night, like I said, and I was planning to come back this afternoon anyway and spend the rest of the day. I pretty much know where everything is, where the panels are being held, like that. If I can’t locate him during the day, he’ll show up where the crowds are at night. Saturday night there’s always Atlanta Radio Theater doing a live production and later there’s the masquerade contest.”
    Sarcastically, Wisnewski asked, “And do you dress up for this masquerade like all these other weirdos we’ve been seeing going in and out?”
    “No, I don’t. And, they’re good people, not what you called them.” Figuring he was in line for an official reprimand at any event, Garrison decided it was just as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “But, now that you mention it, Matt, I did show up once in a blue suit just like the one you’re wearing, with FBI cufflinks just like yours. They wanted to give me a prize for the best Washington bureaucrat costume.”
    Sutton laughed.
    Before Wisnewski could respond, Garrison continued. “Most of the costuming you’re seeing on the surveillance cameras isn’t for the masquerade contest. People wear hall costumes and just live in character for a few days. It’s fun. Our guy might have knocked somebody over the head and stolen a costume. At first thought, that might make finding him harder, but it could make it easier, too, if I know what costume to look for. A lot of these folks will dress as the same character year after year.” What he didn’t tell Wisnewski, but had told Sutton, was that he intended to take certain people within the convention into his confidence, give them a description of the bombing suspect, and let them be extra eyes and ears. Because he had attended DragonCon ever since its inception, a lot of the people there—some of whom he didn’t even know by name, only by face—were people he cared about. If Wisnewski had his way and used standard Bureau procedures, Brownwood might indeed be desperate enough to detonate his device and take thousands of lives. It was a lose-lose situation from the starting gate, but Alan Garrison had to reconfigure it so there’d be at least some slight chance of winning.
    There were a few other details that Alan Garrison hadn’t bothered to mention to his boss, the Special Agent in Charge, Matt Wisnewski. Wisnewski had a personal policy against agents carrying more than two guns. Garrison had a third handgun in his right front pocket. Wisnewski strictly forbade any type of fighting knife, particularly a switchblade or push button, on the grounds that such a knife was the weapon of a street thug, not an FBI Agent. Garrison also carried two Benchmade AFO