Holly smiled back. “You said it. What a pain in the ass.” She hesitated a moment, then said, “Look, I’m not trying to be mean, but don’t use that number unless it’s important. We do have real work going on.”
“Yeah, sure. I won’t bug you unless it’s important.”
I left them and returned to Jennifer patiently waiting in the hallway.
“Let’s get out of here. I’ve got some stuff I want you to look at. See what you can see.”
Going down the stairs, she said, “Pike, I think you took all of that upstairs a little hard. They weren’t saying anything bad. We’re just the cover organization. You said that yourself when you got me to agree.”
I stopped walking and turned around. “I don’t give a shit about any of that. Those damn terrorists are inside the United States, and nobody seems to care because there’s some ridiculous line about domestic operations. Because of it, someone’s going to die.”
I started walking again. She said, “What are you planning to do?”
“Nothing as it stands. I have these reports to go through, and I’d like you to help me.”
Thirty minutes later, we were inside a hotel room near the courthouse on Clarendon Boulevard, the documents spread out on a table.
Jennifer said, “What am I looking for?”
“I have no idea. I’m hoping for a Son of Sam moment, where we get something we can use based on a traffic violation. Just see what you can find.”
I began wading through the reports, all of which pretty much outlined a bunch of bullshit Pakistani taxi drivers ripping off tourists. After two hours of going through them, I was about done. I saw nothing of any interest. I attempted to pass the next five to Jennifer, only to have her intently reading one of the earlier reports.
“What? What do you see?”
“It’s a missing person report.”
“The one about the chick who had a mysterious boyfriend? What about it? There’s nothing there about the imam.”
“Yeah, but something the roommate said caught my eye. She said the boyfriend was in a ‘Muslim cult.’ Why would she say that?”
“Let me see it again.”
The report was fresh, mainly because the police wouldn’t file a missing person request for forty-eight hours, which meant she’d been gone for close to four days. The roommate was hysterical in the report, claiming she knew the boyfriend was bad because he’d never allow himself to be seen. She believed something was strange about him, and when she’d confronted her roommate, she’d been rebuffed. The missing girl’s last act was to go to her boyfriend’s home and surprise him. The roommate was sure the boyfriend had killed her friend for some sort of cult purposes, and she had subsequently preserved the missing girl’s room for forensic evidence, which the police had obviously done nothing with, given the number of missing person reports they received on a daily basis. She’d screamed about the case for damn near four days straight, with little forward progress.
On the surface, the document showed nothing. Just another report like all of the other ones in front of me. Snagged in the secret cell’s search engine because of a tangential relationship to anything with the term
65
I knocked on the door of the ranch-style house, shielding myself from the light drizzle that had begun to fall. Nobody came to answer. It was now two in the afternoon, and I had only about three hours to work with before the girl in the police report came home. I looked back at Jennifer in our rental car and smiled, wondering if I had lost my mind. I was preparing to knock again when it was opened by a middle-aged woman wearing what looked like a Snuggie blanket-robe.
“Hi. I’m looking for Adam. I’m with J3 Special Operations at the Pentagon.”
She looked at me like I was an alien from another planet, then turned and hollered, “Pinky! It’s for you!”
I prayed the man who came to the door would recognize me. If he didn’t, I was dead in the water. I might be anyway, given what I was trying to convince him to do. Adam was on a biometric team. He was the closest thing the Taskforce had to the CSI element from television, only his whole purpose was to catalog biometric data, not solve crimes. I’d worked with him a couple of times, but each one was under duress during the middle of an operation, so we didn’t do a lot of talking. I hoped he remembered me because he was the only one I could find who was on military leave, and thus probably at home instead of overseas or at Taskforce headquarters.
The man who came to the door was about five foot four, pudgy and round. He pushed his glasses back onto his face and said, “Pike? What are you doing here?”
“Hey, Adam. I’ve got a little problem and I need your help.”
Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I was picking the lock of the door from the police report, feeling the press of time. From what she’d said in her interview, the roommate worked until five each day at a gift shop, and we were closing in on that hour. It had taken me way longer than I’d liked to convince Adam to come with me, and then he’d needed to go to Taskforce headquarters to get his equipment, followed by the drive to Baltimore.
I’d prayed he wouldn’t encounter anyone from the team or Kurt while he was inside the Taskforce, knowing he’d come running back out with the security force to arrest me. Luckily, that hadn’t happened, but Adam was decidedly antsy, clearly wondering if my bullshit story was true — which, of course, it wasn’t. Getting to the apartment, I had given Jennifer a dual mission of early warning and Adam control, then had gone to work on the lock.
It popped easily, making me think of Bull for a split second, then we were inside. I went into the bedroom first, using an old Polaroid camera to get a plethora of pictures, taping each one at the position it was taken so Adam could replace everything exactly like it was before we had entered. We were probably the only organization on the planet that used the dated technology, having to get our film from a nostalgia site on the Web. When I was done, I let Adam go to work, scrubbing everything for any biometric elements he could find.
We were out in thirty minutes, with a bunch of fingerprints and bags of several different hair samples for DNA. Nothing more, but enough. I dropped Adam off at Taskforce headquarters, saying, “Process that stuff and get it to Holly. Have her run it. I need an answer by tomorrow morning.”
His face scrunched in confusion, because he thought I was going to drop him back at his house and his warm little Snuggie blanket. Probably wondering how his decision to take two weeks of leave at home instead of Disneyland had gone so badly for him. I held our handshake a little longer than was comfortable for him.
“Don’t fuck me on this. Get it done, and I’ll buy you a beer. Or a milk shake. Whatever you want.”
He nodded and walked into the building in what looked like a daze. I called Holly.
“Hey, Adam’s coming up. Look for him. He’s got some biometric stuff he’s going to process, then I need you to run it against everything you’ve got.”
“What the hell are you talking about? From where?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just do it as a favor to me. Please. There’s a chance the stuff will ping in our database or some police one. You can access the imam’s fingerprints, right? Didn’t he get arrested in Canada?”
“Pike, it’s close to six o’clock right now. It’ll take him at least four hours to process before I get it, and that’s just the fingerprints. You’re talking about an all-nighter.”
“Holly, it’s important. You get a hit and you’ll finally get that twelve-pack I owe you. One more thing: Don’t tell Kurt you’re doing it.”
“Dammit, Pike… you’re going to owe me more than a twelve-pack.”
Rafik watched Keshawn test the circuit on the M57, then simulate initiating the explosively formed penetrator. He was impressed with Keshawn’s attention to detail, and mulled over the decision he had to make. Since the loss of Adnan in Budapest, he had been debating the makeup of the teams, feeling the need to wait for Kamil to arrive before initiating the attack so that each prison recruit would have at least one trusted Arab with
