He and Omar had stood together, but their combined powers of persuasion had not been enough. The Pakistanis had piled into the Honda and torn away from the cabin, setting such a breakneck pace that even the negro had been hard-pressed to keep up.
“Ya Allah,” he breathed again, still almost incapable of coherent thought. Thirty miles — that’s how long they’d lasted.
The driver’s door was still wedged shut from the impact, Lieutenant Nick Dubroznik observed, playing his flashlight over the wreckage. The EMTs had been forced to extract the dead body of the driver out through the passenger side door. His neck had been snapped on impact. Five years in the Michigan State Police, and he’d never seen the like. Another corpse in the back seat, driver’s side.
According to eyewitnesses, the driver of the Honda had tried to pass the car ahead of him, a risky high-speed pass that hadn’t paid off.
Fishtailing on a patch of black ice, the Honda had spun into the path of an oncoming semi.
A fully-loaded semi truck needs roughly a hundred yards to slow from highway speeds to a complete stop. It’d had only thirty. In the end, it was the mathematics that had killed them.
Witnesses had reported two, possibly three more passengers fleeing from the vehicle. A miracle that anyone had walked away, but it wasn’t surprising that they had fled. Neither of the victims had been carrying ID, probably illegals from the looks of them. Drugs, maybe?
He’d seen it a hundred times before. Marijuana, heroin, crack. Over the last few years the use of khat, an amphetamine native to the Arabian peninsula, had become steadily prevalent in the Islamic community. It wasn’t considered highly addictive, but enough so to get the DEA’s shorts in a bind.
The two men might have been Arabs, Dubroznik reflected. He took one look at the buckled trunk lid of the Honda and walked back to his patrol car, retrieving a short-handled crowbar.
Time to apply a little leverage. He slid one end of the bar under the lid and applied pressure, his breath billowing away from his lips in great clouds of steam.
The trunk popped open on the second try and the lieutenant let the crowbar fall to the ground, taking the flashlight from between his teeth.
Something glinted in the beam, and Dubroznik’s breath caught in his throat. He’d been prepared for neatly-wrapped packets of drugs — maybe a suitcase of money. Nothing like this.
The trunk was awash in rifle cartridges spilling out from two ruptured cardboard boxes, light reflecting off the steel casings. And then he saw it, half-hidden beneath a pile of men’s shorts. A disassembled assault rifle, what was that they called it…an AK?
His fingers trembled, and it had nothing to do with the cold. They were going to have to bring the Bureau into this.
Astagfirullah, Tarik whispered, staring at the cellphone now laying there on the desk, now silent, an inanimate piece of plastic. I ask Allah forgiveness.
Where had he failed? Two of his men were dead, another missing. Trained mujahideen, his friends. His brothers. The Ikhwan was more than just a name. They had fought and bled together in the mountains of his homeland. To die here.
A part of him wanted to rage against the injustice of it all, but he could not. There was no doubting the will of Allah, the most glorified, the most high. There was still a path, there had to be.
Show it to me, God.
It was a long moment before he rose, closing his laptop computer and sliding it into his satchel. As much as he had found respite among the faithful, Dearborn would no longer be safe. Not after this…
“How high can they take this, Alexei?” Harry asked, following the Russian into his office. He glanced at his watch. It had been thirty minutes since Petrov had finished the delicate task of extracting the still-functioning tracker, but Carol still hadn’t even begun to come out from under the anesthesia. If Andropov had continued to make inquiries…
Vasiliev looked up. “It’s already as high as it’s going to go, Harry. You need not worry about that.”
“You’re not concerned that Andropov might have purchased himself influence with the consul?”
An eyebrow went up. “Vournikov? Right now he’s probably laying out on the beach down at Baker with his boyfriend. It’s where he spends most of his days while I run the consulate. Even on the cold days.”
Harry shook his head. Every time you thought you were to the point that nothing would surprise you…
And then Vasiliev reached into his desk, retrieving a holstered pistol. An MP-443 Grach, from the looks of it. Standard-issue to the Russian military, the semiautomatic was chambered in 9mm Luger. Seventeen-round magazine.
“I thought you didn’t carry a weapon.”
The former KGB officer slid the paddle holster onto his belt and handed Harry his Colt. “What’s that old saying of yours? ‘To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven’…where’s that from, if I may ask?”
“The Bible,” Harry replied, pulling back the Colt’s slide to chamber a round. Cocked and locked. “Ecclesiastes, the wisdom of Solomon.”
An odd grin crossed Vasiliev’s face, and he clapped Harry on the shoulder as he moved toward the door. “Small wonder I had never heard of it.”
One look at Lasker’s residence was enough to dispel any notions of the spy business being lucrative. The small, faded brick townhouse was itself split into two apartments.
Kranemeyer mounted the steps of the porch, kicking the snow from his boots. He took another long look into the dark, sleet-filled night, then scanned the letterboxes for Lasker’s name. The apartment on the left.
He didn’t bother with the doorbell, bringing up his left hand and rapping on the metal of the door. A hard, peremptory knock.
Two minutes. Then three. Finally, he heard movement from within and the porch light flicked on, nearly blinding him. Kranemeyer swore under his breath, taking a step back.
He had just been exposed to the full view of anyone watching. Even the paranoid have enemies.
The deadbolt slid back and the door opened a crack, a young brunette looking out at him. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Lasker had always liked to hook up with coeds. “What do you want?”
“My name’s Kranemeyer. I’ve come to see Daniel.”
The girl regarded him for another long moment, shifting her gum from one corner of her mouth to the other. At length she nodded. “He’s mentioned you. Come on in.”
The DCS stepped in out of the cold, closing the door behind him. Lasker’s apartment was what he might have expected of the CLANDOPS comm chief, displaying the same sort of mad genius disorganization he brought to the workplace.
The brunette led the way, running a hand through her stringy hair as she padded barefoot across the shag carpet. “Danny!”
Kranemeyer heard the sound of a door opening and closing from the back of the apartment and then Lasker appeared, a towel wrapped around his mid-section.
His face flushed. “What’s going on, sir? I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”
“That’s apparent,” was Kranemeyer’s dry reply. The kid would never learn to stop calling him sir. He cast a sideways glance at the brunette, standing there in her pajama bottoms and tank top. “Can you give us a moment?”