“We can’t comment on that, either,” the smiling agent replied.
“I didn’t ask you,” she replied, “I asked him”—training her eyes back on the Bureau’s legal talent—“lawyer to lawyer.”
“Lawyer to lawyer, I’d have to say that we can’t comment on that,” her counterpart said.
Up in New York City, the personnel files of the organization were being loaded on to handcarts and trundled out the door to long black vans waiting on West Twentieth Street. At the same time, dozens of computers were carried carefully out of the building by a stream of agents.
Stunned NRDC staffers watched in silence as the office was swiftly stripped of almost all its electronic devices. In New York, it was the group’s legal counsel, not a lower-ranking employee, who went ballistic. That happened after the regal-looking lawyer was served with the search warrant by the FBI attorney overseeing the raid. Then she was told by a husky agent to hand over her phone, laptop, and “any other electronic devices.”
The woman raised her voice in protest, saying, “Just stop this right now. I mean immediately.”
“Please provide the requested devices, ma’am,” the agent said evenly, “or we’ll have to place you under arrest.”
“You do that,” she declared. “And I’ll see you in court.”
“Yes, ma’am, you will.”
She smacked the search warrant down on a desk repeatedly. A fellow employee stopped her. She handed over her devices and walked away, visibly shaken.
Deputy Director Holmes sat at his desk receiving a live video stream from both locations on a wide split screen. Witnessing the NRDC’s New York lawyer’s explosion made him grateful that no news media had been permitted anywhere near either location, and that those recording devices had been confiscated so quickly. Watching a search warrant executed was rarely a joyful experience when it involved a staid establishment like the NRDC, a legal entity that he actually held in high regard. But one’s personal feelings could never come into play at times like this, because keeping the nation secure was not for the faint of heart. Then he cringed, thinking that even the strong of heart hadn’t fared very well in that mission lately.
Donna Warnes sat by Holmes’s side, laptop open so she could take notes. But Holmes said nothing. He watched and listened in silence to the live video streams of the raids. He always worried at times like this that a suicide bomber would suddenly appear. It was not a rational response, and he knew that; but it wasn’t a rational world, and he knew that even better.
When it appeared that both search warrants were being executed without incident, he turned back to reviewing the interrogation video of Ruhi Mancur. They had paused it just as the two agents who were grilling Mancur turned their attention from the murder of his landlord to questions about the cyberattack. Mancur had asserted that he’d locked himself in his apartment and remained there during the time that shots were fired in the lobby — when Halpen, apparently, was murdered. Voice stress analysis indicated that Mancur might well be telling the truth.
The voice technology was hardly the final word, but it synced with Holmes’s own assessment of Mancur, and with the physical evidence acquired to that point.
The murder weapon, for instance, had not been found, and it was not easy to conceive of how Mancur could have killed Halpen if he’d been locked in his residence until the FBI arrested him. And it was unlikely that he had left, considering the hostility of a mob that from all reports was clamoring to kill him.
Possibly, final answers about Halpen’s murder would come after forensics scrutinized every square inch of the man’s apartment, but the initial search — and it had been thorough — turned up no firearms in Mancur’s residence. Neither was a gun found in Candace Anders’s apartment upstairs, which Mancur could have had access to, considering the compromised condition of the door.
Agent Anders had rented it as part of her FBI undercover assignment. She had done an outstanding job of insinuating herself into Mancur’s life at a most propitious time. And her valiant defense of him — at deadly risk to her own life — would earn her Holmes’s nomination for a National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the top honor in the intelligence field.
Holmes could scarcely imagine what it would look like right now if their chief suspect, in the most damaging attack ever endured by the country, had been murdered by a mob. It would have smacked of Jack Ruby rubbing out Lee Harvey Oswald, only much, much worse.
Not on my watch.
Holmes resumed the interrogation video. The two agents were now boring in on Mancur about the cyberattack. The suspect remained as steadfast in denying that crime as he had been about the murder. Well, that certainly was no surprise to Holmes; he had received updates on the questioning, and he knew Mancur hadn’t confessed, but he’d wanted to “read” the man himself.
At that moment, Holmes received an encrypted message on his computer that made him moan. It contained an update of the voice stress analysis that was unsettling: In denying the cyberattack, Mancur had registered readings remarkably similar to his answers about the shooting. Ditto for his denial of having ever had any affiliation “whatsoever” with Islamists, including Al Qaeda.
The latest results bothered Holmes deeply. They’d polygraph Mancur, too, but Holmes had a bad feeling that Mancur was a good guy.
He rubbed his forehead so hard that he might have been trying work a genie out of a magic lamp. The effort earned him only a concerned look from Donna, which he did not acknowledge.
And then it got even worse. Another encrypted message said that Mancur came out with similarly consistent results when he confessed, of all things, to cheating on his taxes by phonying meetings with solar energy experts in Pakistan.
Like we care about that crap, Holmes said to himself. Does he actually think we want to nab him the way Hoover nailed Al Capone?
Those were the days, when life was simple. Not that Holmes had lived through them himself, but he was sure you could be nostalgic for times you’d never known, because that was exactly how he felt right now.
Could the stakes possibly be higher? They’d arrested a man of Saudi descent, which was getting huge attention around the world, and the suspect was passing voice stress analysis without missing a beat. If he really was innocent, that meant that their best hope of finding a fast means to stop a final and decisive cyberattack was vanishing. Any second now the country might get plunged back into darkness. Holmes had absolutely no doubt that the terrorists would follow up just as they had promised.
Cocky sons of bitches.
They had to be supremely confident that they could deliver their coup de grâce, or they wouldn’t be waiting. And he had to grant that they’d earned the right to their sickening self-assurance.
In his estimation, the only reason the enemy hadn’t shut down the grid for good was that the anxiety over when that would happen was producing unprecedented social unrest, as well as the means to display the complete demoralization of the United States to the world. From Beijing to Patagonia, from Stockholm to Johannesburg, people were tuning in to video showing Americans in full-scale panic, replete with looting and burning and massive lawbreaking by ordinary citizens. Talk about a propaganda coup. Why would any enemy throw the death switch now? Let her roll. They were probably offering hosannas to whatever deity they worshipped.
Holmes thought the grid would go down for good only when Americans hit rock bottom, leaving his most haunting question unanswered: How much further down the devolutionary scale would the country fall?
He paused the Mancur video and leaned back in his chair. Then he looked at Donna. He had all manner of experts at his command — voice analysts and forensic psychiatrists and cybersecurity geniuses, among scores of others — but it was Donna, with her associate of arts degree from some obscure junior college in Arizona, whose opinion he often valued most at times like this.