"Food," Zuhayr announced. "And drink." One box of doughnuts went into his room, and the other to Mustafa, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes after eleven hours of snoring slumber.
"How did you sleep, my brother?" Abdullah asked the team leader.
"It was a blessed experience, but my legs are still stiff." His hand shot out for the large cup of coffee, and he snatched a maple-frosted doughnut from the box, downing half of it in one monstrous bite. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the TV to see what was happening in the world this day. The Israeli police had shot and killed another holy martyr before he'd been able to trigger his bodysuit of Semtex.
"Dumb fuck," Brian observed. "How hard can it be to pull a string?"
"I wonder how the Israelis twigged to him. You gotta figure they have paid informants inside that Hamas bunch. This has got to be a code-worded Major Case for their police, lots of resources assigned, plus help from their spook shops."
"They torture people, too, don't they?"
Dominic nodded after a second's consideration. "Yeah, supposedly it's controlled by their court system and all that, but they interrogate a little more vigorously than we do."
"Does it work?"
"We talked that one around at the Academy. You put a bowie knife to somebody's dick, chances are he'll see the wisdom of singing, but it's not something anybody wanted to think much about. I mean, yeah, in the abstract it can even seem funny, but doing it yourself — probably not very palatable, y'know? The other question is, how much good information does it really generate? The guy's just as likely to say anything to get the knife away from his little friend, make the pain stop, whatever. Crooks can be really good liars unless you know more than they do. Anyway, we can't do it. You know, the Constitution and all that. You can threaten them with bad jail time, and scream at them, but even then there're lines you can't cross."
"They sing anyway?"
"Mostly. Interrogation's an art form. Some guys are really good at it. I never really had much of a chance to learn it, but I did see some guys play the game. The real trick is to develop a rapport with the mutt, saying stuff like, yeah, that nasty little girl really asked for it, didn't she? Makes you want to puke afterward, but the name of the game is getting the bastard to fess up. After he gets into the joint, his neighbors will hassle him a lot worse than I ever would. One thing you don't want to be in a prison is a child abuser."
"I believe it, Enzo. That friend of yours in Alabama, maybe you did him a favor."
"Depends on if you believe in hell or not," Dominic responded. He had his own thoughts about that.
Wills was early this morning. Jack saw him on his workstation when he came in. "You beat me in, for once."
"My wife's car came back from the shop. Now she can take the kids to school for a change," he explained. "Check the feed from Meade," he directed.
Jack lit up his computer, sat through the start-up procedures, and typed in his personal encryption code to access the interagency traffic download file from the downstairs computer room.
The top of the electronic pile was a FLASH-priority dispatch from NSA Fort Meade to CIA, and FBI, and Homeland Security, one of whom would have surely briefed the President on it this morning. Strangely, there was almost nothing to it, just a numeric message, a set of numbers.
"So?" Junior asked.
"So, it might be a passage from the Koran. The Koran has a hundred fourteen suras — chapters — with a variable number of verses. If this is such a reference, it's a verse with nothing particularly dramatic in it. Scroll down and see for yourself."
Jack clicked his mouse. "That's all?"
Woods nodded. "That's all, but the thinking at Meade is that such a dull message is likely to denote something else — something important. Spooks tend to use a lot of reverse English when they hit the cue ball."
"Well, duh! You're telling me that because it appears to have no importance to it, it may be important? Hell, Tony, you can make that observation about anything! What else do they know? The network, where the guy logged on from, that sort of thing?"
"It's a European network, privately owned, with 800 numbers all over the world, and we know some bad guys have used it. You can't tell where the members log in from."
"Okay, so, first, we do not know if the message has any significance. Second, we do not know where the message originated. Third, we do not have any way of knowing who's read it or where the hell they are. The short version is that we don't know shit, but everybody's getting in a flutter about it. What else? The originator, what do we know about him?"
"He — or she, for all we know — is thought to be a possible player."
"What team?"
"Guess. The NSA profilers say that this guy's syntax seems to indicate Arabic as a first language — based on previous traffic. The shrinks at CIA agree. They've copied messages from this bird before. He says nasty things to nasty people on occasion, and they're time-linked with some other very bad things."
"Is it possible that he's making some signal related to the bomber the Israeli police bagged earlier today?"
"Possible, yes, but not terribly likely. The originator isn't linked to Hamas, as far as we know."
"But we don't really know, do we?"
"With these guys you can't be totally sure about anything."
"So, we're back to where we started. Some people are running around over something they don't really know shit about."
"That's the problem. In these bureaucracies it's better to cry wolf and be wrong than to have your mouth shut when the big gray critter runs off with a sheep in his mouth."
Ryan sat back in his chair. "Tony, how many years were you at Langley?"
"A few," Wills answered.
"How the hell did you stand it?"
The senior analyst shrugged. "Sometimes I wonder."
Jack turned back to his computer to scan the rest of the morning's message traffic. He decided to see if Sali had been doing anything unusual over the last few days, just to cover his own ass, and in thinking that, John Patrick Ryan, Jr., started thinking like a bureaucrat, without even knowing it.
"Tomorrow it's going to be a little different," Pete told the twins. "Michelle is your target, but this time she'll be disguised. Your mission is to ID her and track her to her destination. Oh, did I tell you, she's really good at disguises."
"She's going to take an invisible pill, right?" Brian asked.
"That's her mission," Alexander elucidated.
"You going to issue us magic glasses to see through the makeup?"
"Not even if we had any — which we don't."
"Some pal you are," Dominic observed coldly.
By eleven that morning, it was time to scout the objective.
Conveniently located just a quarter mile north on U.S. Route 29, the Charlottesville Fashion Square Mall was a medium-sized shopping mall that catered to a largely upscale clientele of local gentry and students at the nearby University of Virginia. It was anchored by a JCPenney at one end and a Sears at the other, with Belk's men's and women's stores in the middle. Unexpectedly, there was no food court per se — whoever had done the reconnaissance had been sloppy. A disappointment, but not all that uncommon. The advance teams the organization employed were often mere stringers, for whom missions of this sort were something of a lark. But, Mustafa saw on going in, it would do little harm.