October 3 started uneventfully, just another day. Like always, I made my hour-long commute to the Intelligence Division offices in a nondescript office complex in Columbia, near Baltimore. Our offices were unmarked except for the name “ND Incorporated” in small lettering on the building. That was to keep the average bad guy from knowing what was inside. In a neighboring building, just around the corner, the Narcotics Division had its offices.
My car was a full-size Caprice—obviously an unmarked police car: cop wheels, cop tires, no shiny extras like you see on an automobile the average civilian would drive. My car also had several obvious antennas on the trunk that made it either a police car or a tuna boat. By Maryland State Police standards, it was one of our newer cars—only 150,000 miles on it. The car’s numbered identifier was 662—the 600 series indicating vehicles assigned to Intel.
I arrived at the office well before 8 a.m. and spent the early part of the morning going over intelligence reports from the day before. I also reviewed written reports from troopers in the field so I would be familiar with every active investigation. One of my jobs was to make sure we stayed focused on terrorism prevention, and to guide and direct troopers tasked with infiltrating or gathering intel on groups we were concerned with. We had a staff of more than twenty talented civilian analysts. Their role was to make contact every day with colleagues around the state and with federal agencies to keep apprised of the latest concerns on the home front. The analysts tracked and made sense of reports and open-source intelligence that flowed across the news channels, newspapers, and the Web.
Those of us in law enforcement were very much on edge. We no longer thought in terms of “if” another terrorist attack would happen. Now it was “when.” We had troopers in the field. Our daily communications with allied agencies in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, as well as with a number of federal agencies, produced reams of data. It was my job to review this data and, along with Detective Sergeant Dan Cornwell and Captain A. J. McAndrew, make sound recommendations to state police leadership on how to prevent the next attack. We spent every single day looking for that needle in a haystack, in a field full of haystacks.
Captain McAndrew was at the state police headquarters in Pikesville that morning, conducting what had become a daily intelligence briefing to Colonel David Mitchell and senior MSP leadership. Sometime around 10 a.m. my phone rang. It was Major Jimmy Ballard, the regional commander for the Metro region. Major Ballard also served as the commander of STATE—the state police version of a SWAT team.
Major Ballard said that Montgomery County law enforcement was responding to “a series of shootings.” He didn’t know who, or when, or how many; the only information he had was that it appeared to be the work of a sniper or snipers, and that they may be in a white van. He said that Montgomery County police were overwhelmed and were requesting assistance from the state police. We decided we would make the Rockville Barrack a temporary command center. All Maryland State Police resources would be directed there, pending further assignment.
After hanging up, I directed troopers to respond immediately to Rockville. Then I called Captain McAndrew, who said he would brief the colonel on the situation. With everyone notified, I began preparing myself to leave. There was a jumble of things running through my mind. I had snippets of information on what was happening, but everything was in that initial stage of confusion that occurs during every crisis, no matter how well trained or prepared you are. I quickly scanned the stack of intelligence that was still waiting for my review, making sure I hadn’t missed anything. As I headed for the door, I tapped two civilian analysts to take with me. We would definitely need them. Who knew what this was—some sort of terrorist attack designed to create panic? If so, it appeared to be working. The public was already skittish; if they got wind of this, that panic was going to reach epidemic proportions within a few hours.