Jihad (31 page)

But of course his very existence was a lie, created to facilitate the terrorist network Asad and others had assembled. How much easier it was to be a sniper than a policeman, Dean thought. You didn’t have to listen to other people’s falsehoods, let alone pretend you believed them.

The U.S. attorney had obtained a warrant to search the mosque and its records, but Telach told Dean to stay away, just in case the area was being watched by Asad’s associates or whoever had ordered the murder. Even though he’d already blown his cover at the motel, Dean didn’t argue; he doubted the search was going to come up with anything very useful.

Around four A.M., Dean finally left the interrogation area to check on the progress of the search for Kenan, which was going about as well as most missing persons investigations, which was to say not very. The FBI forensics team had taken the car to one of the city garages to examine the interior of the vehicle; since it was only down the block, Dean went there to have a look himself. When he arrived, he met one of the police detectives assigned to find Kenan: a short, Hispanic black woman around thirty years old who introduced herself as Elsa Williams.

“Guy did some grocery shopping this afternoon,” she told Dean, pointing to a table where the items in the car had been bagged and tagged after being checked for fingerprints. There were bottles of water, shoe polish, disposable razors, Post-It Notes, and a large collection of snacks. There were also two pair of sandals in different sizes. Kenan seemed to have stopped at six different stores in all; the receipts were laid out in plastic bags next to the items.

Dean slipped the camera attachment onto his PDA and beamed copies of the receipts to the Art Room. At best, he expected an exotic analysis of Kenan’s eating habits. What he got was a lead.

“We were able to get into three security systems at the stores Kenan was at,” Rockman told him twenty minutes later, while he was walking back to the police station. “He spoke to a clerk at this Rite Aid for a while. It looked like he knew him.”

“Where?”

“Clerk’s gone home,” Rockman said. “I’ve sent an instant message with his name and address to your handheld. It’s, um, a kind of grotty end of town.”

FROM ROCKMAN’S DESCRIPTION, Dean expected to find the clerk in the heart of a burned-out battle zone. Instead, he found him on the top floor of a three-family house converted into student apartments. Discarded mail sat stacked on the radiator just inside the door. Bicycles lined the downstairs hall and the second-floor landing. The place smelled like a gym locker.

After eying the lock, he took out a pick and small torsion wrench from beneath his belt and worked over the tumblers. Like any skill, lock picking required considerable practice to master, and while the lock on the clerk’s room wasn’t complicated, it took Dean almost ten minutes to get it open. When it finally gave way he nudged the door slightly, returning the tools to his pocket and taking out his gun. Then he eased the door open, expecting but not finding a chain lock.

The door opened into a small kitchen; beyond it to the left was a large room that served as combination bedroom, dining room, study, and living room. Textbooks were piled neatly in the middle of the floor, making an irregular wall about knee high.

A student. The books covered a variety of subjects—chemistry, literature, Plato.

Plato. Maybe the kid was a philosophy major, thought Dean.

The textbooks’ owner lay sprawled on the bed under a mountain of covers. Dean looked over the room quickly, making sure that Kenan wasn’t there. Then he retreated, checked the bathroom just off the kitchen, and went back to the door.

“Rockman, call the room here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I want to wake this guy up without waking everyone else in the house up.”

The clerk was either very tired or a very sound sleeper; it took six rings before he reached for the phone. Dean waited a second, then knocked.

“Now what?” asked a sleepy voice inside.

“Martin, I need to talk to you.”

“What?”

“There’s been a murder and we’re afraid there’s another victim. Please.”

Dean went to the stairs and gestured to the cop to stay put. There was no sense coming on too strong.

“What the hell is going on?” mumbled the clerk from behind the door.

“There’s someone we can’t find. We’re afraid he’s dead.”

“You’re going to have to show me a badge or something.”

Dean took a business card with a generic U.S. Marshal logo from his wallet and slid it under the door.

“How do I know this is real?”

“Call the number. But do it quick, all right? I’m not exactly sure if we have tons of time here,” said Dean.

The door opened. Bare chested and skinny, the clerk frowned up at Dean and asked what the U.S. Marshals were doing in Detroit.

“Do you know this kid?” Dean unfolded a print of Kenan made from one of the video bugs.

“Kenan’s dead?”

“No. At least I hope not,” said Dean. Something in his voice must have tipped the clerk off—Dean had never been a very good liar—and the boy immediately stiffened, suspicious.

“We think he may have been targeted by the person who murdered this man.” Dean gave him a picture of Asad, dead in the room, lying in a pool of blood.

“God,” said the clerk, his resistance gone.

“When did you last see Kenan?”

“I didn’t.”

Dean pulled out the print of the surveillance photo from the store where the kid worked, which had a time stamp on the bottom from that afternoon.

“Did you see him after this?” he said, trying to sound as diplomatic as he could.

“Jesus.”

“You’re not in any trouble, Martin. I just want to prevent another murder if I can. How do you know Louis?”

“Louis? This is Kenan Conkel.”

“Kenan. Yeah, I’m sorry, that’s what I meant. It’s been a long night. You know him well?”

“We were freshman.”

“At Upper Michigan?”

“No. Wayne State. I didn’t know he went to Upper Michigan.”

“You went to Wayne State with him,” said Dean, realizing why they hadn’t found Kenan. “When was this?”

“Three years ago, when I was a freshman.”

“Kenan Conkel, Wayne State.”

“Working on it,” said Rockman in his head.

CHAPTER 98

THOUGH HE ROSE just before dawn, Marid Dabir felt as if he’d overslept. He said his prayers, then went to find some place to eat and consider his next move.

The small hotel had three dozen rooms, arranged in two stories around a parking lot. The steps down from the second story went through a small building next to the entrance to the lot. As Dabir passed through, he noticed the night clerk sleeping on a couch behind the reservation desk.

Dabir walked over to him, looking to see if he’d left his wallet anywhere nearby—the man’s credit card number would be handy for making a plane reservation. But Dabir didn’t see it and decided it wasn’t worth trying to sneak it from his pocket.

His search had disturbed the mouse for the hotel computer, waking the unit from sleep mode. The program for handling reservations flashed on the screen; as Dabir looked at it, he wondered if he might be able to get a credit card number from that. Backing through the records could be done easily with the mouse, and within seconds Dabir had not one but three different credit card accounts with their owners’ information, including the supposedly secret printed IDs on the cards.

There was a bagel shop across the street from the hotel, but the idea of having breakfast with Jews nauseated him. Dabir walked two blocks until he found a silver-walled diner. On the way in he picked up a copy of the local paper, having learned from experience that even the nosiest American tended to leave a reader in peace.

He was halfway through his tea and toast when he found the story about the murder of an unknown man in a city suburb. Barely six paragraphs long, the story said that the man seemed to have been killed by three gunmen, who were then caught in a shootout with police who responded to a 911 call.

Unsure how much if any of the story was true, Dabir turned the page.

CHAPTER 99

“THIS IS ALL your fault,” Bing told Rubens. Her ears were tinged red and seemed to stick straight out from the sides of her head. “You bypassed all of the controls, all of the processes—”

“I bypassed nothing,” said Rubens. He tried to continue toward the conference room, but Bing put out her hand, blocking his way.

“You used a personal relationship with the president—you used George Hadash’s death to get around me.”

“I did nothing of the kind,” said Rubens sharply.

“If you had taken him when I suggested, he’d be alive and we’d know where the target was. You put your ego above what was best for the country.”

Second-guessing was standard Washington procedure, and Rubens had fully expected it. The accusation that he had used Hadash’s death, however, angered him greatly. Rubens pressed his teeth together to keep from saying anything. His silence did the trick—the red tinge on Bing’s ears spread to the rest of her face, and she swirled around and headed down the hallway.

“I see you’re warming up to Ms. Bing,” said Defense Secretary Blanders behind him.

Rubens managed a wan smile before continuing to the briefing room. The head of the NSA, Admiral Devlin Brown, had arrived earlier and was sitting on the far side of the room. Bing was stooped down behind him, whispering something in his ear; she saw Rubens come in and rose abruptly, moving over toward her spot at the head of the four-sided table.

Rubens pretended he hadn’t seen her and took his seat next to Brown. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the nearby carafe, even though he’d already had two that morning.

“Anything new?” Brown asked.

“We’ve identified the man who was with Asad and we’re looking for him. We’re looking for patterns in airplane flights and one of our people will be on the flight that we think Asad was to take from Detroit. Outside of that, we have nothing.”

More precisely, they had quite a lot: intercepts of possible messages, money transactions, telephone conversations, a vast file of rumors and innuendo compiled by the different agencies now involved in trying to determine the plot’s target. What Rubens meant was, they had so much information that they had nothing.

President Marcke burst into the room, moving as briskly as Rubens had ever seen him walk. At most sessions with his aides, the president assumed the role of a listener, waiting until all sides of the issue were raised. He’d sit back in his seat, often unconsciously twisting a paperclip, not quite Buddhalike, but generally impassive and as unemotional as a judge as his advisors debated an issue. It was only in one-on-one or very small meetings that he put the true Marcke on display, thumping his desk and occasionally jabbing his companion’s chest to make a point.

But today was different. Today he spoke as soon as he came through the door, his voice sharp, as if he were a football coach at halftime with his team down by a touchdown.

“Gentlemen, ladies. One thing I want to make clear from the start,” he said, walking to his usual spot at the table but not sitting down. “Some of you believe this crisis is a byproduct of my decision to allow Asad into the country rather than having him arrested in Turkey. I believe it was the best and most logical decision at the time. Some of you may disagree. Those disagreements are with me, and you may take them up at the proper time. That time is not now. Billy, what do you have for us?”

Rubens, cheered by what he interpreted as a not-so-subtle slap at Bing, began his briefing.

CHAPTER 100

EVEN FOR A U.S. Marshal—or an ersatz one, such as Tommy Karr—carrying a pistol on an aircraft involved major bureaucratic hassle. Forms had to be filled out, identities checked, authorizations reviewed. Karr didn’t mind, however—someone had left two boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the security office where they parked him. He was just debating the relative merits of powdered versus granulated sugar coverings when the head of airport security arrived to take him to the plane.

Carefully finessing the detector at the gate so he would appear to be just a regular passenger, Karr boarded with the first-class passengers, taking a seat not far from the pilot’s cabin. The passenger list had already been thoroughly vetted, but Asad’s organization had demonstrated that they were adept at operating under the radar, and Karr eyed each passenger carefully. The people boarding, carry-ons pushed against their knees to squeeze down the aisles, were mostly business types bound for the Gulf Coast area, where construction was booming more than a year after Hurricane Katrina had laid New Orleans low. Only two were of obvious Middle Eastern descent.

“How you doing, Tommy?” asked Chafetz from the Art Room as the plane backed from the gate.

“Fine.”

“Lia’s going to meet you at the airport.”

“Can’t wait.”

“The ten or fifteen minutes after takeoff is the most crucial. Statistically.”

“I guess I better not take a nap then, huh?” Karr laughed.

The man in the seat next to him had overheard him talking to himself and eyed Karr as if he were a nutcase. Karr gave him a bright “How ya doin’?” and pushed back in his seat, all smiles.

As the plane taxied, a large black man walked up into first class from the rear cabin. He walked slowly, obviously looking for someone he thought was a passenger on the plane.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said a stewardess, chasing him from behind. “You have to remain seated until the plane is in the air.”

The man ignored her. Karr watched as he went around the front of the first-class area, turning slowly and walking down the other aisle. The stewardess shook her head and repeated her admonitions without visible effect.

“Sit down, bub,” said Karr’s neighbor. “Give the lady a break.”

“Mind your business.”

“I said sit down.”

“Stuff it,” said the other man, disappearing into coach.

“Nice, real nice,” said Karr’s neighbor, turning to him. “That’s supposed to pass for clever, right? You believe that?”