He was never more frightening than when he was silent. Carol regarded her companion for another long moment, then turned her attention back out the window of the SUV, to the dirt-brown piles of snow shoved brusquely against the side of the roadway.
He hadn’t spoken five sentences since they had left the safehouse. She could still see the expression on his face when he had executed the Russian — a look devoid of emotion. Calculating. Ruthless.
The same look he wore now. The man who had held her close and comforted her as they sat on the bed of the safehouse was gone, replaced by…this. “What makes you so sure this woman will help us?” she asked finally, glancing over at him. His leather jacket was unzipped, gaping open to expose the bulge of the Colt holstered to his side. A weapon, just like the man himself.
“Because she doesn’t have any other choice,” came the cryptic response. “Spend enough time out in the field and you learn that people will do things out of fear that they’d never do for love.”
Blackmail. Carol had worked long enough at the Agency that it didn’t surprise her. Still, she found the reality unsettling, out from behind the protective walls of Langley.
“How did you end up at the Agency?” she asked, watching the countryside speed past.
He looked over at her, surprise glinting in those steel-blue eyes. “Why?”
“No reason, really,” Carol replied, taken off-guard herself by the intensity of his response.
Silence fell once again between the two of them as Harry turned the SUV onto a side road. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy with irony. “Sometimes you have to lay down your dreams and pick up a gun…just because it’s the right thing to do and there’s no one else to do it. Not much point in looking back.” He pointed up the road at an off-white double-wide trailer nestled in a grove of leafless trees. “We’re here. Do me a favor.”
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “What?”
“Let me do the talking.”
Words of purity. Words of truth. The words of God, subhanahu wa ta’ala. The most glorified, the most high. Tarik Abdul Muhammad’s fingers traced over the flowing Arabic calligraphy, reading the sacred words of the Qur’an. Who doth more wrong than he who inventeth a lie against God…
“Salaam alaikum, my brother,” a familiar voice greeted, interrupting his thoughts. Blessing and peace be upon you.
A smile crossed Tarik’s face as he turned, looking into the eyes of the mosque’s imam, a grey-bearded man in his late fifties. He was dressed in Western clothing, as were they all. There was no point in drawing attention to themselves.
“Alaikum salaam,” he replied, placing both of his hands on the shoulders of the older man and drawing him close as they kissed on both cheeks in the traditional Arab greeting. “Is everything prepared for my brothers?”
“Arrangements have been made,” Imam Abu Kareem al-Fileestini replied, turning and giving a warm smile to Tarik’s four companions. “They will be provided for, inshallah.”
“And the scientist?”
“At hand,” was the imam’s response. Abu Kareem turned and beckoned to a swarthy young man standing in the doorway, a can of Mountain Dew clutched in his hand.
About five or six years younger than himself, Tarik thought, taking the measure of the man in one sweeping glance as the imam kept talking. “Our brother from Lebanon, Jamal al-Khalidi, an honor student at U of M.”
Tarik smiled, reaching out to enfold the young man’s hand in both of his own. “Wolverines…”
As the camera’s shutter clicked crisply, taking picture after picture, they all showed basically the same thing: a smiling, happy couple — family snapshots — a doting husband, an adoring wife.
Who said pictures never lie?
“I’ve got enough,” Rhoda Stevens announced at length, laying down her camera and retreating behind her laptop. In her mid-fifties, she still moved with the grace of the runner she was.
Carol reached up and firmly removed Harry’s hand from her shoulder as she stood and stretched.
She walked over to where the Jamaican woman sat, now diligently working away in a photo-editing program. The green screen that had served as their background had now disappeared from view, replaced by a glorious vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Smoke curled upward from the cigarette clutched tightly in the woman’s ebony hand, wispy tendrils filling the air with the pungent smell of marijuana.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
Rhoda chuckled, a rich, throaty sound. “Thirty years, both sides of the law. Wish I could do the same thing in real life — wouldn’t look so old.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Carol saw Harry cross the room, cautiously glancing out the window. “How soon can you have the documents ready, Rhoda?”
“Forty minutes, give or take.” Another long drag on the joint. “When did you get so nervous, Harry? I don’t remember that from before.”
The look Harry shot back across the room could have frozen stone. “Just do it as quickly as you can. They’re going to throw the net wider with every passing hour.”
The black woman was unfazed, her gaze never leaving the screen of her laptop. “Then wait in the next room, will you? Nerves can be contagious.”
One of the benefits of Dearborn’s crime rate was that there was no difficulty disposing of an unwanted car. Leave it unattended long enough, and it would disappear. No muss, no fuss.
Abdul Aziz Omar reached back into the car one last time, wiping the steering wheel with a cloth. There was no sense in leaving his prints — having spent eight of his thirty-one years behind bars in the state penitentiary meant that the cops had them on file.
He closed the car door and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, fingers closing around the curved grip of a Smith & Wesson Model 27 revolver. It wasn’t safe to walk these streets unarmed, the tall black man thought, looking cautiously both ways as he exited the alley where he’d left the car.
The gang-bangers and crackheads preferred semiautomatics when they could get them, which was far too often these days. After all, they were the guns you saw on TV and in music videos.
Omar’s choice of the .357 Magnum was more prosaic, based on a simple bit of advice from a fellow inmate. The man had been an unrepentant infidel, serving a life sentence for rape and murder, but his advice had been sound.
Revolvers don’t eject their shell casings. Keep your shots few and effective and you can walk off the crime scene with half the evidence the cops usually depend on.
It made sense. His eyes continued to rove the desolate street as he made his way back toward the mosque several blocks away. A paradise of tranquility in the middle of hell.
The same could not be said of the bar to his right as he moved down the street, his long legs covering the ground in smooth, powerful strides. Right now it appeared innocent, almost harmless in the bright rays of daylight, but he knew different.
Another five, six hours and it would be transformed into a noisy, raucous den of iniquity.
He should know, for that had once been his trade. He closed his eyes in remembrance and could once again feel the discs spinning beneath his deft fingers. DD Cool, they’d called him in those days, those heady, sinful days of drugs, sex and music.