agents walked up a narrow slate path to the front door and rang the bell. There was no answer. Keith rang again, then knocked and called Cooper’s name. When there was still no answer, Maggie walked around back while Keith tried to see around the curtains that had been lowered to cover the picture window that looked out on the lawn. The living room was dark, but Keith made out a pale glow that he took for lights that were on in some other part of the house.
Maggie returned to the front yard. “The side door opens into the kitchen. It isn’t locked. What do you think?”
“I don’t like this.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Keith followed Maggie around the side of the house. They drew their guns, and Maggie eased the door open. They were immediately hit by the nauseating smell that hung over every scene of violent death they had ever entered.
“Mr. Cooper,” Maggie called, not expecting an answer.
Keith nodded and the agents crept into the kitchen. The lights were on, and there were pots soaking in the sink and half a loaf of bread and a knife with a serrated blade on a cutting board.
Keith and Maggie entered the dining room cautiously. They saw half-finished meals at place settings where two chairs had toppled over when their occupants leaped up from them. Neither the man nor the woman had made it very far. Mr. Cooper had been shot in the head and had toppled to the floor. A woman who Keith assumed was Mrs. Cooper had made it halfway to the living room when a shot to the back had brought her down and a second shot to the back of the head had finished her off.
Maggie knelt beside Mr. Cooper and studied the entry hole in the center of his forehead.
“One shot, dead center. That’s not easy,” she said.
“Tying up loose ends,” Keith said wearily as he took out his cell phone and dialed Harold Johnson’s number.
“The bombers didn’t do this,” Maggie said as soon as Keith finished the call.
“Their handler, the guy who told Cooper to place Bashar and the others?”
“That’s a good guess.”
“Let’s check Cooper’s bank records to see if he deposited a large sum of money recently.”
“He could have been a dupe. I mean, Bashar and the others were probably smuggled in, so they couldn’t have gotten jobs legally. Cooper might have thought he was getting a group of illegals jobs without knowing what they were planning to do.”
Keith looked at Cooper’s corpse. “We may never know the answer to that one.”
Chapter Thirty
One of Imran Afridi’s companies owned a home on the beach in Southern California. Another owned a palazzo near Lake Como in Italy and an apartment in Tokyo. But Afridi had watched the Redskins play the Giants on a big- screen television in the den of his mansion in northern Virginia because he wanted to be close to the terror and chaos that would follow the demolition of FedEx Field.
Afridi knew that the networks used many cameras during a football game so they could film the action from many angles. He hoped some of them would still be filming as FedEx Field crumbled to dust beneath the feet of the infidels. Lying naked between silk sheets in his bedroom was a fifteen-year-old girl who had been provided to him by a Russian who specialized in such things. Afridi planned to ravish her as soon as the full extent of the devastation at the football stadium was clear. Violent sex was his preferred way to release tension.
Afridi waited with a combination of elation and nerves as the game clock counted down the minutes. He tensed when the scoreboard clock showed seven and a half minutes left in the first quarter. He leaned forward expectantly when the clock showed 7:00. Then nothing happened, and the clock ticked down to 6:59.
One of the announcers commented on disturbances in several sections in the stands. Another commentator said that it looked as though some of the vendors were being arrested. Then Washington’s tight end caught a pass in the end zone, and the incidents in the stands were forgotten by everyone except Imran Afridi.
Afridi waited five minutes more, to see if the ambulances would explode, before grabbing a disposable cell phone and calling Steve Reynolds.
“We will meet in one hour! You know the place,” Afridi shouted into the phone before disconnecting and repeatedly slamming the phone against his coffee table until it was smashed to pieces. Then he stormed upstairs to visit his fury on the naked girl who was bound and gagged in his bedroom.
Half an hour later, Imran stuffed a bonus into the purse of the severely battered girl and had his driver take her to a private clinic that had dealt with the objects of his sexual attentions in the past. He was calm now that his needs had been satisfied, and he was able to think clearly about the debacle at the football stadium. There had to be a traitor, but who was it?
T he Chesapeake and Ohio Company was chartered in 1825 to construct a canal connecting tidewater on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., with the headwaters of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania. The canal would open a trade route for ships between the eastern seaboard and the trans-Allegheny West. The endeavor did not go smoothly, and the canal was not completed until 1850. In 1938, the 185-mile-long
C and O Canal was sold to the United States government, and the C amp;O Canal National Historical Park was established by Congress in 1971.
Afridi parked in Georgetown and followed a walking path alongside the canal until he arrived at a stone bridge that crossed it. He was wearing jeans, running shoes, and a hooded sweatshirt that hung over a black Glock. A sheath holding a hunting knife was attached to his belt on the side opposite the holstered gun. Afridi was no stranger to violence and had used the knife and the gun on different occasions.
Five minutes after Afridi settled into the shadows beneath the bridge, Steve Reynolds materialized out of the darkness. The American was dressed in black. The bill of his baseball cap left his face in shadow. Afridi was certain that Reynolds had been hiding, watching him, when he arrived.
“This isn’t smart,” Reynolds said. “The last thing we want is to be seen together.”
“Don’t tell me what is smart. Tell me what happened,” Afridi demanded. “I have been planning this… this event for years. Everything was in place. Why is that stadium still standing?”
“The detonators failed.”
“How do you know that?”
“I tried to detonate the explosives in the ambulances. Nothing happened, and I never heard any explosions in the stands, just the normal noise you hear during a game. When I was certain that the plan had failed, I drove to the safe house to sanitize it. When I was through, I set charges using the detonators we bought. They didn’t explode, so I torched the house. Then I took a close look at one of the detonators. It was defective.”
Afridi looked furious. “You told me your seller was reliable.”
“He’s an arms dealer, Imran, a criminal. I checked him out the best I could. Everyone I talked to said he wasn’t law enforcement, but he could also have been FBI or CIA or ATF. Anyone can be bought or scared into cooperating.”
“And if he did not betray us?”
“Ali Bashar is the only member of the cell with the skill to sabotage the detonators. He was trained to use explosives in the camp, and he’s smart.”
“Why would he betray us?”
“I have no idea.”
Afridi thought for a minute. Then he looked directly at Reynolds. “Did you test the detonators before you bought them?”
Reynolds glared back, and Afridi saw the American’s hand drift toward his side. “Are you accusing me of something, Imran? Let’s get this shit into the open.”
“Did you test the detonators?” Afridi repeated. His voice was steady and his tone was as cold as ice.
Reynolds started to answer Imran angrily, but he stopped and his brow furrowed.
“Ali tested a stick of dynamite and a detonator, and they worked. The box with the detonators and the box
