The interior flashed bright white and the air snapped as the door to the barn flew open. In seconds, the team was inside the barn. No shots had been fired.
No terrorists had been spotted either.
So where were they?
The logical explanation was behind the metal door in the sheetrocked wall. The HRT lined up, ready for the next phase.
“Door opens out,” said Koch. “We can blow off the hinges and go in.”
“You’re assuming it’s locked,” said Karr. He went to the wall and nudged one of the agents aside. Then he got down on his hands and knees as he crawled next to the door opening. There was about a half-inch clearing between the door and floor, just enough for a video fly to peer through. He took one out, activated it, and held it between his thumb and forefinger, sliding it across the opening.
“Whatchya seein’, Rockman? Besides my thumb?”
“Nothing. Shadows.”
Karr put the fly level on the floor and then tapped it through the opening with his finger.
“Anything?”
“I can see a table. There’s no one by the door.”
The stench of manure practically choked him as he got back to his knees. Karr remembered the downside of visiting his uncle’s farm — mucking the horse stall.
Though it had never smelled quite this bad.
“Give ’em more of the spiel before we get asphyxiated,” he told Koch. The FBI agent gave the Miranda warning yet again, this time adding a Spanish translation.
“Movement?” Karr asked Rockman.
“Negative.”
“You see a booby trap on the door?”
“I would’ve told you if I did.”
Karr slid out his PDA and did a scan anyway, looking for a magnetic field that would indicate an electric current. Then he tried the knob. It was indeed locked.
“You want us to force the door?” asked Koch.
“Just a second. I need some air,” said Karr.
He slipped back and went outside the barn. “Lia — start looking around the perimeter for a tunnel or something like that. I think these guys have flown the coop.”
* * *
Lia radioed the state police backup units in, spreading them out along a road that ran along the southern and eastern perimeters of the plantation property. In the meantime, her helicopter pilot spun toward the west, giving her a better view of that side of the target area. The Dauphin hovered to the north.
“I think we have some movement fifty yards west of the small house,” said Rockman, examining the infrared from the overhead army plane. “Yeah — two figures running through the woods there, in the direction of that creek.”
Lia sent a police unit up the road to a bridge over the water. She scanned the area near the creek without seeing anything.
“You see them, Lia?” asked Rockman. “They’re cutting across the creek. Three of them.”
Lia caught one shadow as it slipped up the embankment. By now men from the assault team were in pursuit, moving toward the water.
“That field over there,” Lia told the pilot, pointing to an open area beyond the woods. “We’ll let them get into that about halfway, then buzz down in front of them and tell them to surrender. If we can slow them down, our people on the ground can surround them.”
The shadows popped from the woods sooner than she expected; the troopers hadn’t gotten up to the road yet.
“Get down there,” Lia told the pilot.
“What are we going to do if they shoot?”
“I’ll take care of that,” said Lia, taking out the two pin grenades she had in her belt. “Get us between them and the road.”
The pilot pitched the Bell practically onto its side, skidding in the direction of the road. Lia cracked open the door, pulled the pins on the grenades, and dropped them into the field. Then she picked up the mike for the PA system.
“The next grenades will be high explosives,” she said. “Throw down your weapons and put your hands up.”
Two of the men complied. The third began running toward the road.
A contingent of troopers reached the side of the field and began approaching the two men who’d stopped. But they were too far to catch the third man, who continued across the field toward the road. A thick patch of junglelike woods sat on the other side. The vegetation was thick enough that even their infrared vision gear would have a hard time picking him up.
“Put me down on that road,” Lia told the pilot.
“What?”
“Go. I have to get that guy,” she said.
Not designed for quick exits, the helicopter door slapped against Lia’s arm as she pushed out, throwing off her balance just enough that she fell to the ground. As she rolled to her feet, she saw the man cutting toward the road about twenty yards away. Lia scrambled after him, guided by the spotlight from the helicopter. The ground was uneven and the brush seemed to bite at her as she ran. She barely gained ground, but just as he was about to reach the road, the helicopter descended in front of them, sending a spray of dirt and herding him back to her right. The man seemed to have forgotten her, or at least lost track of where she was, and within a few seconds she was close enough to hear his huffing breaths. Just as she reached out to grab him, he cut back toward the road. Lia lunged; she got hold of his pant leg and shoe, tripping him up. He tumbled free, but as he rose she leapt onto his back, her forearm smacking his head.
To Lia’s surprise, the man not only managed to get to his feet but continued running. He flailed his elbows as she tried pulling him down; finally he tripped over something and they both sprawled to the ground.
Lia had had enough of this. She pulled her pistol from its holster near her ribs as she got to her feet.
“I’ll blow your ankles apart if you move,” she warned the man.
Either he got the message or was too exhausted to run any more.
* * *
The FBI team used a shotgun with special metal slugs to blow off the hinges and lock; three quick blows and they were inside.
The room was empty, a trapdoor open on the right. Three of the walls were filled by large shelves stocked with boxes and large bottles; the fourth was bare, with a padlocked door at the center. The smell here was more chemical than barn-yard, and Karr finally realized what they’d found.
The HRT men scrambled downward and began working their way through the passage out to the plantation’s southern field.
“Big-time drug factory,” said Koch. “Methamphetamine. That’s sulfuric acid, rock salt — that’s probably the lab room in there.”
He pointed at the padlocked door. Karr went over and examined the lock.
“We don’t want to blow that door down,” the FBI agent added. “We’re going to have to call a hazardous materials team. We’ll probably need a new warrant, given that the door there is locked and this doesn’t look like a terrorist setup, at least not—”
“Well, look at this,” said Karr loudly, slipping his lockpick back under his belt, “the door is unlocked.”
He bumped his shoulder against the jamb and the door swung wide open.
The room was better stocked than most high school chemistry labs and could have given a few college classes a run for the money as well. Rather than simply extracting ephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicine and making methamphetamine from it as most meth labs did, this operation apparently produced the illegal drug using raw ingredients obtained from Mexico. Sometimes called crank or speed as well as meth, methamphetamine was an illegal stimulant popular with bored suburban youth, rural yahoos, and people seeking a high to accompany sex.
The lab also had the ingredients needed to made ecstasy and mescaline as well.
“This is a huge haul,” said Koch. “Might be a record, at least for this area. Congratulations.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be much consolation for the folks back home,” said Karr.
* * *
CHAPTER 112
“I wasn�
��t really a friend, not really,” Muna Lufti told Dean. “Kenan — he was kind of strange, you know?”
“Did you ever go to a mosque with him?”
The girl made a face, then glanced at Elsa Williams before turning back to Dean, as if she thought the black police detective was somehow on her side. “First of all, women and men are usually, you know, separate. Right? And second, it’s masjid. Mosque is a Western word. It comes from mosquito. It’s like, a slur.”
“Which masjid did he belong to?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did he become a Muslim?” Detective Williams asked.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. He wasn’t born one?”
“A white boy like that?” said Williams. “No way.”
The girl, a very light-skinned Arab-American, looked at the FBI agent as if she had used a four-letter word.
“How often did he go to class?” asked Dean.
“Couple of times. Kenan kind of blows in and out. You wouldn’t see him for weeks, then all of a sudden he’d be there. Like a ghost. He always aces tests. He’s like a genius nerd.”
“When did you last see him?” asked Dean.
Muna shrugged. “First or second week in September, around there. In class. We talked about my trip.”
“Where’d you go?” asked Dean.
“Mexico City. I’d been, like, planning it for years. Months. He was pretty interested — we probably talked about it for two or three hours. Longest I ever talked to him about anything.”
“Was he trying to hit on you?” asked Williams.
“Kenan? Are you kidding? Like, me and Kenan?”
“What interested him about Mexico City?” said Dean.
“I don’t know. How I got there. What the taxis are like, the airport, hotels, buses.”
“Not the mosques?” asked Williams.
The girl made a face and rolled her eyes. “It was just — it was stuff like how to get around, did I have to talk in Spanish, that kind of stuff.”
“Did you give Kenan any Mexican money?” Dean asked.
“Why would I do that?”
* * *
“Charlie, we need you to go to the airport,” said Marie Telach as Dean and Williams got into the detective’s car a short time later.
“Excuse me just a second,” Dean told Williams, taking out his cell phone. He pretended to punch the buttons, then held it up to his ear. “Hi, it’s Charlie. You have any news for me?”
“Muna gave us some good leads,” said Telach in his implant. “We’re pretty sure Kenan took a flight to Mexico City earlier today.”
“He had a Mexican coin in his room.”
“Oh? So he’d been there before?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in September.”
“Okay, we’re going to check into that. In the meantime, I have a Gulfstream that should land at the airport in about an hour. Can you get there?”
“Yeah.” He snapped the phone closed and found Williams staring at him.
“I have to go to the airport.” he told the detective.
“Why?”
“Catch a plane.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t think I can say.”
“No,” said Telach.
Williams shook her head. “Which agency are you working for again?”
“Marshals Service.”
“Right. And I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
CHAPTER 113
Jackson knew as soon as he saw the video from the Detroit area convenience store that it wasn’t Asad bin Taysr. He zoomed in on the side of his head, where he’d been bandaged in Istanbul; there was neither a bandage nor a healing wound there.
But his profile was very familiar, and not simply because his close-cropped grayish beard and sideburns mimicked Asad’s. In height, build, and approximate age, he looked very much like the subject of the German operation: Marid Dabir.
Jackson was tired, and the video, shot by a convenience store security camera, was hardly the best quality. Most likely it wasn’t Marid — the Germans had concluded he was dead — but it was something that should be checked out. Very possibly it was another member of Asad’s circle who had not been previously identified.
“Are there other images?” Jackson asked the city detective who’d shown him and Dallas Coombs the tape.
“Not from this store. There are other cameras in the area. We haven’t checked them yet. We just weren’t sure it was worth it. I mean, the clerk in the store gave us almost nothing. The guy seemed suspicious, that’s all.”
“I’d like to take these to a lab that can analyze them.” said Jackson. “And we should look at other cameras in the area, especially around the same time. Ten in the morning?”
“No. A.M. and P.M. are flipped on the tape. That was shot at night. You can see the darkness at the very edge of the frame there, from outside. It’s nighttime.”
“There’s someone standing watching from outside,” said the FBI agent who’d accompanied Jackson.
“Face is too fuzzy to see,” said the policeman.
“My lab may be able to check that as well. I’d need the original.”
“Not a problem.”
Jackson looked at his watch. “Do you think the clerk at the store would be working tonight?”
* * *
Yasif Ramadan was a thirty-year-old father of two who lived on Detroit’s south side. The nightshift gig was his night job; during the day he was a plumber’s helper for a small company in the city. He volunteered his background without prompting as soon as Jackson and Coombs showed him the print from the surveillance tape. Ramadan remembered the man not because he was Arab but because he had stared accusingly at Ramadan through the whole transaction.
“Like I was a bug,” said Ramadan. “I could tell he was a slime.”
“Did you think he was trying to steal from you?” asked the FBI agent.
“No. I watched him — I watch everyone at night. Of course I watch them.” He pointed to the side below the counter, where a split television screen carried feeds from four video cameras stationed in the store. “I saw that he was not stealing. You could tell he wasn’t from around here, because of the way he looked at things in the store. He couldn’t read English very well, if at all.”
Jackson surveyed the store. The surveillance cameras were so well hidden that he couldn’t spot them, even though he knew from the screen where they must be stationed.
“Was he with anyone?” Coombs asked.
“Guy stood in the door the whole time,” Ramadan told the FBI agent. “That was creepy. Was he the victim?”
“We’re not sure,” said the FBI agent.
“Why did you think he was?” asked Jackson.
“I heard that it was an Arab,” said Ramadan. “There are rumors he was a terrorist.”
Word spreads quickly, Jackson thought.
“We really don’t know,” said Coombs.
“We should hang all of them,” said the clerk.
“Where did you hear the rumors?” Jackson asked.
The clerk shrugged. “Everyone is saying it. Maybe because he’s a Muslim.”
Jackson saw the pain on Ramadan’s face, as if the accusation against someone who used the same words to pray as he did implicated him as well.
“If you think of anything else,” Jackson told him, “please call Agent Coombs.”
CHAPTER 114
An optimist might have pointed out that the Louisiana raid had not been a complete fiasco, given that it had broken up a major drug lab; indeed, it was very likely that the illegal drugs manufactured there had already ruined a hundred times more lives than terrorists ever could.
William Rubens had never been accused of being an optimist, and so he described the operation without making any note of a positive side. Neither did anyone else who was listening in on the late-night conference call with the president.
“This puts us back at square one,” said Bing. “Worse — we’ve lost t
welve hours.”
“Maybe the attack died with him,” suggested the vice president.
No one wanted to state the obvious — they couldn’t count on that — and after a few moments of dead air, the head of Homeland Security gave a report on different preparations around the country, ending by recommending that the security status be raised from orange to red. Rubens had never liked the color codes and had little use for the system in general, but this was neither the time nor place to voice his objections. In the end, the president vetoed the change, noting that the guidelines called for such an alert to be given only if a “site specific” threat had been clearly identified.
“Well, hopefully we get that intelligence before it’s not too late,” said Bing, characteristically driving a knife into Rubens’ ribs as the phone conference ended.
Tired, Rubens rose from his desk and kicked off his shoes, beginning a Yoga routine to stretch his tight muscles. He leaned back, breathing from the pit of his stomach. The yogis who’d taught him as a boy had said that the exercise emptied the bad energy from his body, replacing it with fresh strength. Rubens had stopped believing most of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo that accompanied yoga when he was fourteen or fifteen, but he welcomed that particular idea now.
He remembered his promise to Irena Hadash. It was far too late to call her; he’d do so tomorrow, first thing.
Perhaps he should call now anyway.
No. It was too late. Better to let her sleep.
The Art Room phone rang as he started another stretch. Rubens exhaled slowly, then picked up the receiver.
“Rubens.”
“Mr. Rubens, Ambassador Jackson has something you ought to know about,” said Chris Farlekas, who had relieved Telach as Art Room supervisor for the night. “I have him on the line right here.”
“Let me speak to him.”
“I think Marid Dabir was in Detroit the night before Asad was murdered.” Jackson told him when he came on the line. “I have a video surveillance tape of him, or what might be him, in a convenience store near where the murder took place. It looks very much like the video from Istanbul.”
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