calls.”
“Depends,” she said. “You got time to make me a cup of coffee?”
“What?”
I figured I’d better intervene before Art got himself shot. “You two must not have been introduced last night,” I said. “Special Agent Art Meyerman, Iowa DCI, meet Special Agent Gwen Thurgood, FBI counterintelligence/ counterterrorism unit.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Art. He turned back to me. “Well, you got another office I can use? One with a real secretary?”
“Sure,” I said. “How about your old one? We’ll see if we can get a typist for you.” He and I walked down the narrow hall to the cramped office we’d shared years ago, when we were both on the night shift for the county.
“Boy,” he said. “She’s pissy, isn’t she?”
When I got back to the main office, Gwen was on the phone, and holding up one hand to get everybody’s attention.
“Thanks, Manny,” she said, and hung up the phone. “Well.”
We all looked at her. Well, indeed.
“That was Manny Ortega,” she said. “Best intelligence analyst in the business. He’s done the photo images I sent last night. This man, the thin-faced one in the wedding photos? The one you say looks like the boss?”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Manny thinks this is a man named Odeh. He’s not a hundred percent certain, but he believes it is. Do you have prints on him, too?”
“No. Not as far as I know, we don’t.” I had to ask. “How’s that spelled? I mean, it sounds Irish…”
“It’s Mustafa Abdullah Odeh. Oscar, delta, echo, hotel,” said Gwen. “That’s okay about not having the prints. That’s what I thought, but I had to be sure. Anyway, Manny didn’t know Odeh was in the country, but he’s just about positive it’s him. Manny Ortega is really, really conservative on this sort of thing. This is the first photo he’s seen of Odeh without facial hair, but even so, I’d say we have a ‘for certain’ here. Just exactly where and when were these photos taken, do you know?”
Always keep your handwritten notes. I checked. “Minneapolis, or the Twin Cities, anyway…about three weeks ago. No closer data than that, at least not yet.” I made a note to attach to the first one. “It was probably in conjunction with a Catholic wedding, bride and groom were Juan and Adriana Munoz… we’ll just check with the Catholic churches in the Cities, and see if there was a wedding party by that name.” I added a big S, to remind me to stick Sally with this.
“Right.” She made a note, too. “Why don’t you let us do that? We can do that for you, and really fast.”
I crossed off the S, and thereby added a few months to my life. “Excellent.”
“So, then,” continued Gwen, “without going into too much detail, Mustafa Abdullah Odeh has a U.S. education, mostly at City College in New York. He’s got connections throughout the Middle East, with all sorts of terrorist cells and organizations. He gets things started, mainly. Plans. He’s kind of like a staff officer would be in the army. Manny says that Mustafa Abdullah Odeh pledged bayat to Osama bin Laden. That’s an oath of fealty. He’s also been associated with Hammas, Hezbollah, and the PLO. Over a period of fifteen years or more. The Hezbollah connection is the most important, by the way. They’re the most capable of ‘em all. Anyway, this is a dangerous man. Not necessarily directly. If he’s involved, directly or indirectly, it means that there is a serous foreign terrorist involvement somewhere in the area.”
Great. Just great. “Everybody but the Popular Front for the Liberation of Dubuque,” I said. I don’t know if it eased the tension much, but it helped me.
“I’ll double-check that,” said Gwen. “Anyway, members of the cell, the cell he works with, would probably call him something like the ‘Wise Man’ or the ‘Wise One.’ He carries plans that are forwarded to him from higher up. He also controls their finances. They need money, they come to him.”
“Okay.” We were getting way out of my league.
“But he normally won’t be directly involved. He’s too valuable to have him get himself killed, and way, way too valuable to have him get himself interrogated.” Gwen looked around. “I feel certain it is Odeh,” she said, quietly. “We all should be very, very careful from now on.”
There was a momentary silence.
“Well, all right!” said Volont. “This is more like it.” He was serious. The man thrived on this sort of thing, but I couldn’t help thinking about last time Volont was in his element. We’d gotten one of our officers killed on that one, along with several others, and all those terrorists had been homegrown. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” said Volont. “This group is probably dangerous if provoked, but just from the people we know who are involved, they aren’t a top-of-the-line terrorist cell. The only one who’s probably spent any profitable time in a training camp would be Odeh.”
The intercom buzzed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Hey,” said Sally, “Special Agent Hawse is out at the airport. His helicopter just left, and he’d like a ride in to the office.”
“Get one of the marked cars, would you? “I said, without even checking with the FBI agents in the room. “He’ll look a lot less inconspicuous in one of those, and they can get him past the CNN people out there. We really should make sure he’s up to speed before the media grabs him.”
“CNN? Holy shit,” exclaimed Sally, but not to anyone in our room, “turn on the tube, CNN’s outside…” and the connection went dead.
That broke the tension a bit.
Once he’d arrived, having successfully ducked the news teams outside, Hawse seemed very pleased with himself. “The art of distraction works every time. When I was a kid,” he said, taking off his coat, “my brother and I used to do a magic show. I never realized how useful it was going to be.”
Volont looked at the ceiling.
“So, boys and girls,” said Hawse, “what have we got this morning?”
“You might want to sit down,” said Volont.
“Go for it,” said Hawse, who remained standing.
“The skinny-faced dude in those wedding photos, with the Hispanics? The ones we saw last night? Well, we’ve got him I Ded as one Mustafa Abdullah Odeh, a bin Laden associate. Money and plans man.”
“Who did the ID?” asked Hawse.
“Manny Ortega,” said Gwen. “He gives it a ninety-nine percent probability.”
“I suspected something like this,” said Hawse, not missing a beat. “I was going over scenarios in my room last night. It fits.”
That was something to see. He’d not only fielded the news with remarkable aplomb, he’d managed to make it appear just slightly out-of-date because he’d already considered it. I’d only seen that kind of thing once before, in Art Meyerman when he was just a new deputy. No matter who was turned as a suspect in any case, Art always said, “Oh, yeah, I figured it was him.” I knew he was fudging most of the time, but Lamar didn’t pick up on it. But that was how Art had gotten promoted to chief deputy, by making Lamar think he was always on top of everything. I was willing to bet my next month’s check on Hawse making assistant director before too long.
Within ten minutes, Sally buzzed from the dispatch desk. “You guys might want to come out here, we’re on Headline News, and we’re being tied in to a terrorist act in New York…”
By the time we got to the dispatch center, our segment was done, and we stood around for almost fifteen minutes, waiting for it to be rebroadcast. But, then, there it was. They showed footage of a deli in New York, and a hospital, and a bit of an interview. But all the time, the voice-over was giving out remarkably accurate information. They had the three delis the FBI had identified, the total number of casualties, the correct number of deaths, the current status of the hospitalized victims, and the date of the first admission to the hospital.
What they didn’t have was the substance. Not yet. I said as much.
“Don’t be too sure about that,” said Volont. “They’re probably doing their verifications right now.”
Then, when we thought we were going to dodge the bullet, they showed the Nation County Sheriff’s Department, complete with a lot full of media vehicles and our unmarked patrol cars. Then, they named the plant in Battenberg and identified it as the source of the suspected contaminated meat.
“Damn,” I said. “They’re good.”
