She saw Deputy Director Harper standing across the room in deep discussion with Patrick Landrieu, the director of the TTIC. Naomi couldn’t be sure, but it looked like they were arguing about something. That’s not a good sign, she thought to herself as she continued to scan the room for Ryan.
She finally gave up and tried to focus on her map of northern Virginia. Taking another sip of lukewarm coffee, she stared through bleary eyes at the myriad of roads. After much debate, she had finally decided to focus her efforts on the six counties directly north of Richmond: Caroline, Hanover, Spotsylvania, Stafford, Prince William, and Fairfax. Her specific interest was I-95 running north into Washington, and she had branched out her search according to Ryan’s suggestions: anything more than 5 miles away from the interstate had been immediately removed from the list, along with any property larger than 180 acres.
What she was left with was a staggering list of 564 farms sold in six counties in the past three months. Naomi shook her head in disgust as she lifted a thirty-page fax from the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, only to slap it back down a second later without reading a word. She was about to reach for another sheet when she realized that someone had slumped down in the chair next to her.
Her eyes opened wide when she saw the state he was in. “Oh my God, Ryan! Where have you been? Do you have any idea what time it is?”
He ignored her as he reached over to grab the coffee from her desk. “Anything come up yet?”
Her eyes drifted over his clothes — the same jeans and T-shirt he had been wearing the day before. His face was covered with at least a week’s worth of stubble, and his eyes were red-rimmed and raw. He looked exhausted. “Nothing yet. Sixty-seven people are working on this, and that’s just in this room. I’m starting to think it’s impossible.”
He snorted and said, “Of course it’s impossible. The whole thing is a huge fucking waste of time.” She watched as he drained the Styrofoam cup and tossed it onto the desk in front of him. “You don’t know this bastard like I do, Naomi. He could be anywhere. He could be sitting in this room, for all we fucking know. He’s just too damn good at what he does.”
His voice had gotten louder with each passing syllable. When he stopped talking, Kharmai was aware of the silence around her. She looked up to see that the deputy director had crossed the room and was standing right behind them. Harper leaned down to whisper something in Ryan’s ear, and she watched as both men walked out of the room a few moments later.
With a heavy sigh, she turned her attention back to the fax pages in her hand and tried to block out the cacophony around her that soon returned to its elevated pitch.
Jonathan Harper stood outside the glass doors of the CT watch center and jabbed a finger into the younger man’s chest. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Ryan? I needed you here four hours ago. This was your idea, remember? What’s the problem?”
“I was wrong, John,” he snapped. “It’s all bullshit. We’re not doing anything. We’re just sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop-”
“That’s all we can do at this point. We can’t exactly go house to house and ask for William Vanderveen, can we?”
Kealey pushed a hand through his lank hair. “No, I…” He shook his head as he searched for the right words. “Jesus, I don’t know. I just think we could be doing more.”
Harper’s voice dropped as he reached out to squeeze the younger man’s shoulder. “Look, you made some good points yesterday, threw out some good suggestions, but I still need you. I listened to what you had to say because I trust your judgment. I know it’s too passive for your taste, but I think this could work. In any case, it looks like our best option for the moment.” He saw that his words hadn’t changed anything. It was time to take a shot in the dark. “Something else is bothering you. Katie?”
When Kealey looked away, Harper knew he had it right. “What happened?”
There was a long pause. “She walked out on me at the hotel, went back to the Cape. She said she couldn’t handle it…”
“She’ll come around, Ryan.” The dark gray eyes came up to meet his own. “She knows the deal. I went through the same thing with Julie a thousand times when I was in the field. The sooner we finish it, the sooner you can get back to her. That’s how you have to look at it.”
The younger man nodded his head. “I guess so.” He let out a long breath and leaned back against the wall. “This shit is killing me, John.”
“I’ve seen the way she looks at you. She’ll be waiting when you get back to Maine, I guarantee it. Listen, go back to the hotel. Shower, shave, get some food and a change of clothes. Then do me a favor and get your ass back here. Naomi’s lost without you.”
The last part was said with a smile. Ryan managed to return it briefly before pushing off the wall and moving toward the elevators. He was almost there when Harper’s voice rang out behind him.
“He’s close, Ryan.”
Turning to look into the other man’s face, Kealey could do nothing more than hope to God he was right.
“Trust me, it’s almost over.”
When Jonathan Harper went looking for Kealey in the early afternoon at Tyson’s Corner, he found him seated back at Naomi’s side. Ryan had taken his earlier suggestions and now looked almost presentable, although his choice of clothing still left something to be desired. In a room filled with clean-cut FBI agents and representatives from the State Department, Kealey was wearing faded jeans and a threadbare dress shirt — over a T-shirt, untucked — with the first three buttons undone.
Harper shook his head at the younger man’s pointed efforts to avoid conformity, but knew that he would let it slide. As far as results were concerned, the deputy director thought that Ryan was the most valuable person in the room, and at the moment, results were all that he cared about.
They looked up from the maps they were going over as he approached. “Got a minute?”
Naomi nodded and pulled out a chair. As Harper sat down, they immediately noticed that he was wearing a slight smile. He placed a pile of bank statements on the table in front of them.
“We finally got something on those Saudi passports the Feds picked up at National Airport. Theresa Barzan held accounts in three major banks in London, accounts into which several large deposits were recently made. Want to guess where the money came from?”
“Tehran?” Naomi ventured.
“Try Sudan. First Central Bank of Khartoum. Clever move on the woman’s part… We have no diplomatic relations with the Sudanese, so we can’t pressure them to release the depositor’s name.”
“But we can track the money from London, right?” Ryan asked. He frowned slightly. “It wasn’t actually the Feds that came up with this, was it?”
“No, it got kicked up to the FATF. The Treasury Department figured that would result in more British cooperation.”
Ryan nodded in approval. The Financial Action Task Force on money laundering had been set up in the late- 1980s to combat organized crime, but since 9/11 had become increasingly involved in the process of tracking terrorist funds. Both the U.S. and the U.K. were charter members. “This is a definite lead, but the problem is time.”
“I agree,” Naomi said. She traced a finger down one of the long columns of numbers. “This is pretty typical, what she’s done here. It’s called smurfing. By breaking down the funds into tiny amounts, it usually ends up getting lost in the huge number of transactions that take place each day. And this is only the beginning. From London, she would have routed the original sum through at least another dozen banks. Even with the starting point, it’s going to take a while to trace it to the recipient.”
“All the more reason for us to follow up on Ryan’s idea,” Harper responded. He pushed a second sheet of paper toward them. It was the letterhead that immediately caught their attention. “This one is nothing helpful,” Harper said. “So don’t get your hopes up. The French Foreign Office sent off a rocket to the State Department earlier today with an inquiry as to ‘the current state of our terrorist threat.’ Basically, they wanted to know if we have things under control, and they weren’t too delicate about letting us know what they thought of our security measures.”
Naomi looked surprised, and Ryan let out a low whistle. “I’ll bet that didn’t go over too well.”
The deputy director smiled ruefully. “You don’t know the half of it. If Chirac ever gets a look at the response we sent them, he’ll probably have to break off diplomatic relations on principle alone. Same thing with the Italians.
