“As long as it doesn’t interfere with your college experience.”
Jonathan tilted his head. “Well, yeah.”
They ordered at the counter and found a booth, then waited for their food to come.
“So are you closer to catching the terrorists?” Jonathan asked.
Vail shushed him as she glanced around. “You know I can’t talk about it.” Jonathan’s face scrunched a bit, tense from concern. “We’re making headway. We’ll get ’em. Just stay away from public gatherings.”
“Police are all over the place. Barricades up on half the streets around campus. Freakin’ pain in the ass.”
“One of the exciting things about GW is that it puts you at the intersection of politics, law, and power. You can’t walk a block or two without hitting a building of significance to the country — or the world. The International Monetary Fund, the White House, Supreme Court, Con—”
“I get it, Mom.”
“That makes us a target,” Robby said. “More bang for the buck than hitting Kansas or Wyoming, you know?”
As he said that, Vail felt a gust of wind rattle the large glass storefront window to her left. “Did you feel that?”
Robby nodded slowly as he swiveled in his seat and looked out at the people on the sidewalk and across the street in Washington Square Park. Most had stopped and were craning their necks in all directions. A few started to run and—
Vail’s Samsung began buzzing. It was a text from Uzi:
new attack. eastern market. meet me there.
on my way, im close
Shit, that wasn’t a gust of wind, it was blowback from an explosion.
“Gotta go.” She rose from the booth.
“Everything okay?” Jonathan asked.
Vail looked at her son. Even if she had thoughts of lying to him, she knew he would know. “Another bomb,” she whispered.
Robby started to rise but Vail waved him back down.
“I’ll see you later.”
Vail arrived at the intersection of 7th Avenue SE and North Carolina Avenue and pulled her car against the curb in front of Port City Java. Several Metro Police cruisers were lined up along 7th, blocking access to the wide cobblestone road that fronted the market.
But what caught Vail’s eye was the carnage before her. The covered pavilion that ran the length of the brick building had been toppled, the steel columns supporting it knocked out from beneath the roof and folded in half as if struck with a baseball bat.
Bodies lay sprawled on the pavement, paramedics and first responders triaging the injured and yelling orders to others in the vicinity. Vail jogged along 7th, headed toward a concentration of police cars, fire engines — and a SWAT van.
She pulled on crime scene booties and moved closer. The double wood doors at the entrance to the market — doors she had passed through many times over the years — were missing, the opening enlarged by what appeared to be an armored truck, the rear of which was partially protruding from the building’s interior.
DeSantos, wearing a wool overcoat, was inside talking to a CSU technician. He caught Vail’s gaze and waved her in.
She made her way over the chunks of cement and fragmented brick, getting some assistance from another officer who helped her across the debris-laden threshold.
Inside, devastation. The normally bustling marketplace, which featured vendors and restaurants on both sides of a central aisle, was in pieces. Bloody bodies, and parts of others, were strewn across the wreckage — as far as she could see.
“What the hell happened here?” she asked under her breath.
DeSantos apparently heard her because he said, “Just setting off a bomb must be getting boring for them.” He handed a piece of the rubble to a nearby technician. “Best we could tell — I only got here about ten minutes ago — they drove up 7th in that armored truck and crashed through the pavilion, mowing down as many people as they could. They swung right into the building, plowed through the entrance. Then they got out.”
“How many?”
“Two, best we can tell.”
“What happened after they got out of the truck?”
“They started moving through the crowd, firing AK-47s. Two cops saw the truck hit the pavilion, so they were on scene immediately. They came in through the east entrance, drew down, and that’s when the jerkoffs detonated their vests.”
Vail climbed atop the front bumper of the truck and looked out over the interior. Headed in her direction was Uzi, stopping to render assistance to medics who were administering to some of the fallen victims. The scene looked like a war zone.
“So, what do you make of this?”
Vail turned. “What?”
“Instead of loading explosives into a backpack or suitcase, they used a truck, assault rifles, and suicide vests. I’m not a detective, but I do understand the concept of MO. And they just changed their MO completely.”
“Objective was to kill as many as they could. Invoke fear. What better way to do that than by changing the method of attack? You don’t know what’s coming next. You can’t draw a pattern. More terror that way.”
“Why hit the market?” asked Uzi, who was approaching.
“We’ve increased police presence and restricted access to important buildings, made it more difficult for them to go after hard targets. So they chose a soft one.”
“Smart.”
“Scary smart. They’re well organized, prepared, flexible, and as we know, well funded.”
Uzi’s phone rang. He glanced at the display and said, “I gotta take this.”
Gideon Aksel’s voice was tight, concern permeating his tone. “I’ve got something for you, Uzi, but you’re not going to like it.”
“I’ll be the judge. Tell me what you’ve got.”
“Just so you know, I’ve verified this. There is no question of its accuracy. None.”
“Got it. What’d you find?”
“You wanted info on Mahmoud El-Fahad.”
“Anything and everything.”
“January ’03. The suicide bombing in Haifa.”
“The commuter bus?”
“The bomber, he was Fahad’s nephew.”
Uzi glanced over at Vail and DeSantos, still chatting by the armored truck. “His nephew was a suicide bomber?” Uzi closed his eyes. “Fahad’s nephew was a radicalized terrorist?”
“It sounded like this man meant something to you, so I knew you weren’t going to like it. But facts are facts.”
Uzi found a clearing and sat down on a damaged metal stool that had belonged to a now-destroyed deli. The prone body of a dead security guard was laid out before him. He averted his gaze. “Was Fahad involved?”
“Answer me. This man is important to you, no?”
“In some ways, yeah.” He wanted to give Aksel more, but he was already dangerously close to stepping over the line.
“I don’t know if he was part of the plot, Uzi. I dug around, talked with the men involved in the investigation. Mossad’s got nothing. Shin Bet had nothing on Fahad. Now that could be a good thing—”
“Or it could mean nothing.”
“Or it could mean nothing. I can tell you he was there. He saw his nephew blow himself up.”
Uzi could not help but cringe. “Anything else in Mossad’s file? Did we have any contacts with Fahad?”
“Only one. Nothing of any significance. He was questioned. The interrogators noted that he seemed distraught but he denied any knowledge that it was going down. There was no proof either way, so he was not held. We had no further contact with him. He left the West Bank five months later for the US.”
Uzi remembered being told that Fahad had lived in the West Bank and knew Gaza well. “Has he been back?”
“Multiple times. Nothing unusual about his visits.”