“I asked Marcus to join us,” Rapp said. “He should be here any second.”
Kennedy leaned against the front of her desk, placed her hands on the edge, and crossed her legs at the ankles. She was dressed to the nines for the cameras. Dark blue skirt and jacket with black nylons, black pumps, and an ivory blouse. “I’m not sure I understand why you’re so concerned.”
“Yesterday, when you sent me on that little hop to go meet with Catherine and George?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I told you last night they gave me some pretty good intel.”
Kennedy could tell by his sour expression that there was a catch. “And?”
“Let’s just say your friends up on the Hill wouldn’t approve of their methods.”
Kennedy noticed how he referred to them as her friends. “So you’re nervous about sharing the intel with the FBI?”
“Yes… and I promised George up front that I would be really careful with the stuff he gave me. Between the two of us, I’m about 99 percent sure it came from his top source inside the Cuban government.”
Kennedy nodded and considered how nervous she would be if she had to share one of her top sources. “Understandable.”
“I told you they IDed two of the three, and they have a line on the third.”
“I remember.”
“Well… you’re not going to believe this.” Rapp pulled out his phone and showed her the photos. “Art just sent me these. This is why I asked you to come up here. They found these fake IDs at the crime scene in Iowa. One of these-” Rapp checked the small screen. “This one right here, I’m almost certain, is a Moroccan named Ahmed Abdel Lah, who Catherine tells me is one of the three men we are looking for.”
“And just how does she know that?”
“Unofficially, and I mean really unofficially, someone Catherine trusts picked up Ahmed’s brother and had a long talk with him. I don’t know all the details, but it sounded pretty solid to me.”
“And?”
“You know Catherine as well as I do. She wouldn’t dump something like this on me if it was bullshit.”
“What about the other photo?”
“I don’t know. When Marcus gets up here I’ll have him send it to George and Catherine. I don’t want it to come directly from either of us. Better to make it look like it was part of an information dump.”
Kennedy thought about it for a second and said, “So Ahmed’s brother was more than likely tortured.”
Rapp shrugged as if to say of course he was.
“And if we share this information with the FBI, they will want to know where we got it?”
“Exactly.”
“And then at some point in the not-so-distant future they’ll send a couple dozen agents and attorneys over there to question Ahmed’s brother and Catherine’s man.”
“And we can’t let that happen,” Rapp said.
“No, we can’t.” Kennedy stared out the window.
“What I need you to do is come up with a plausible explanation for why we think this double homicide is linked to the attacks of last week, and do it in a way that doesn’t compromise George and Catherine or their people.”
“We could alter those photos and dump them into the database.”
“Not a bad idea, but Art already ran them through TIDE and came up with nothing. This has to come from overseas.” Rapp looked toward the door, hoping to see Dumond. “As soon as Marcus gets up here he’ll know how to handle it without leaving any fingerprints. I also have him looking into an issue in New York.”
“New York?”
Rapp was getting ahead of himself. “The farm in Iowa was purchased through an LLC… I don’t know… six… eight months back. The lawyer who handled it was out of New York. I wanted to get a look at his files before all the Dudley Do-Rights show up on Monday.”
“Follow the money?”
“You got it. I’m half tempted to fly up there myself and slap the guy around a little bit. Make sure I get the whole story out of him.”
Kennedy shook her head. “I don’t like that idea.”
Rapp knew she wouldn’t, but asked anyway. “Why?”
“If this adds up like you say, the FBI will most certainly be all over this attorney on Monday. I know you can be persuasive, but there is no guarantee the attorney won’t file a complaint… in fact, once he’s surrounded by a bunch of federal agents I can almost guarantee he’ll file charges, and then I’ll have to explain to a lot of upset people what one of my top operatives was doing beating an American citizen and subject in a major criminal investigation.”
Before Rapp could answer, there was a knock on the door. Dumond entered the office and ambled over. He was wearing khaki flat-front pants, a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt, and an old black knit, square-bottom tie. With his afro he looked like a reject from the seventies. “What’s up?”
“We need your expertise,” Rapp said. He showed Dumond the two photos. “I need you to pull these off here and send them over to Charles and Catherine. Can you make it look like an information dump? Send it to them first and then send the photos to all our allies asking for help in identifying them.”
“No problem.”
“How’s it going with the lawyer in New York?”
“James Gordan,” Dumond said.
Rapp could tell by his tone that he wasn’t impressed. “Did you find the money trail?”
“The start of it. Chase Manhattan provided the funds for closing here in the States.”
“Where’d the money come from before it got to Chase?”
“Nassau, and that’s going to take a little longer to crack.”
“Why?”
“Royal Bank of Nassau… very good security. I’ll crack it eventually, but it’s going to take the better part of a day if not the weekend.”
“Shit.” All this international banking secrecy drove Rapp nuts.
“Give me a few hours. I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Good. Get to it. I’ll be down to grab the phone in a few.” Rapp looked back at Kennedy and said, “I think you should call George and Catherine. Try to explain our predicament.”
Kennedy looked at the clocks on the wall behind her desk and then hit the intercom button and asked her assistant to get Butler and Cheval on the phone. “Tell them it’s urgent, please.”
“Any ideas?” Rapp asked.
“A few. Nothing great, though.”
“I think I might be able to thread the needle.”
Thirty seconds later Butler and Cheval were on the line. “I’ve got Mitch here with me,” Kennedy said into the speakerphone as Rapp joined her at the edge of the desk.
“Hello, Mitch,” Cheval said, “you were going to send me those DNA samples from the six terrorists.”
“Sorry, Catherine, but I might have something better.” Rapp filled them in on the double homicide in Iowa, the explosives, and the fake IDs. “One of these guys looks vaguely familiar to me. I could swear I’ve seen a photo of him recently.” Rapp shared a look with Kennedy and added, “He looks Moroccan.”
There was a prolonged silence and then Cheval asked, “Why don’t you send me the photo?”
“On its way shortly. When you get it… maybe you could run it by your people in North Africa and see if they get a hit. Maybe it matches a passport on file.”
“I will do that.”
Butler cleared his throat and asked, “What about the other photo?”
“He looks Saudi to me,” Rapp replied.
“I see,” Butler said. “What exactly are you looking for, Irene?”
“Just trying to be careful, George. You know how this works. If we put these guys on our watch list and tip off the FBI, they’re going to want to know how we figured out who they were. So far, Mitch is running with the idea that they don’t look Hispanic like their names would suggest.”
