“The guy who handled the crisis in Hawaii?”
“And the one in Alaska too. He has the pictures and is on his way to Africa with them, Eritrea specifically. He left early this morning.”
Henna spent the next half hour detailing Mercer’s involvement with Prescott Hyde, from the initial approach to search for the diamonds, through Harry White’s kidnapping and the subsequent shoot-out at Dulles. “Did anyone from NRO do a hard analysis of the pictures?” he asked in conclusion.
“No, not really,” Morrison admitted. “The bird hadn’t been calibrated when we lost her. The pics looked like a bunch of junk to our people.”
“Well, they’re not junk to the group who perpetrated that attack at Dulles.”
“We need to get that material back. Not only is it highly classified, but it’s also evidence,” Baines said.
“No. What we need to do is haul in Prescott Hyde, I mean today, right now and then let Mercer figure out just what the hell is going on.”
“Dick, we can help Eritrea later. Dig up the diamonds in a few months or something. We have to get those pictures back.” Morrison’s voice was backed with every ounce of command in his body but Henna didn’t even blink.
“Tom, if you want to pick up Hyde on your own authority and have this make the six o’clock news tonight, be my guest. But if you want the help of this office, then we do it my way.”
A tense minute passed, the gleaming pendulum of the wall clock knifing through the time, carving the seconds away.
“All right,” Morrison relented. “If we do it your way, what happens now?”
“I get an arrest warrant from Justice and we all go over to pay Hyde the worst visit of his life.”
Morrison looked over at the still quiet Baines. “What do you think, counselor?”
“Once we have Hyde, we can send someone to Africa to get the photographs from the man Mercer.”
“Ass covering, Tom?”
“Mine’s on the line. Goddamn right I’m going to cover it. Let’s get it over with.”
Henna rode with Morrison in the back of a Bureau car, Baines sitting in the front with the driver. Three other dark sedans followed them in convoy as they headed toward Fairfax, Virginia. Before leaving FBI headquarters, Henna phoned Hyde’s office and determined the undersecretary wasn’t at work and hadn’t shown up all morning. He then called Hyde’s home but the line was disconnected. Fearing that Hyde had already fled, Henna fast-tracked a warrant through the Justice Department and put together a small team to make the arrest.
As they drove, he sorted details in his head, mentally writing items on note cards and shuffling them randomly, searching for patterns. It was an old trick that served him well. On the first card was Rosen with the stolen Medusa photographs followed by their purchase by Hyde. After that, everything could fit together any number of ways. He wondered if, after Rosen sold them, he was approached by a group in Europe who also wanted them, someone from the Balkans, for example. It was possible that Harry’s neighbors heard one of those languages and not Arabic. When Mercer refused Hyde’s offer, the terrorists had kidnapped Harry to force him to go to Africa to find the diamonds for them. From security briefings, Henna knew that Iran supported Muslim groups in Albania and Serbia and also had ties to the factions in Beruit. The tie-in was circumstantial at best, but it was a good lead.
That still left Hyde and his motivation. Money was the most obvious answer. He was using his position at the State Department to deal himself in on any potential wealth, Henna thought. He bought the pictures himself, then hired Mercer for the expedition. But where, Henna wondered, would he get that kind of money? And then he realized Israel, through Selome Nagast, was footing the bill. Hyde paid for the photographs and they were paying for everything else. The reasons were obvious when he considered the Iranian connection. Israel was trying to prevent some terrorist group from securing a new font of untraceable wealth, an unknown diamond mine.
He was thinking about his upcoming interview with Hyde and knew he could use any information he got from the undersecretary to get the Mossad to open up about their operation. He’d always felt that America’s security arrangement with the Jewish state was too one-sided. This was a perfect opportunity to level the playing field.
Henna’s first inkling of a disaster in the making came in the form of a police siren’s rising Doppler screaming behind the convoy. An instant later, a cruiser rocketed passed the FBI vehicles in a bejeweled blur, its bubble lights flashing sapphire and ruby. They were on the Little River Turn-pike, just beyond the Beltway, and the police car raced through traffic lights with little more than a tap on its brakes. Another siren was approaching fast.
Because of traffic, it took them a further twenty minutes to get to the residential neighborhood where Hyde had his home. It was an affluent subdivision, each four- and five-bedroom house built on more than an acre of land with plenty of old trees to shield neighbor from neighbor. The newly macadamed streets were spotlessly clean, and the telephone poles had yet to darken with the patina of age.
The closer they got to Hyde’s street, the darker the sky became and the thicker became the awful stench of burned wood and melted plastic.
Beginning ten houses from Hyde’s, the street looked like a riot scene. The police had established a cordon behind which the curious gathered anxiously. Henna’s credentials got him through with only a moment’s delay and they drove on, the car weaving around police cruisers, fire engines, and idling ambulances in a slow slalom. When the breeze tugged at the clouds of smoke, they could see the bright inferno that had been Prescott Hyde’s slice of the good life.
Henna’s self-satisfaction disappeared. He was no arson specialist, but he knew enough to realize that an accelerant, no doubt gasoline, had been used to start the fire and was still burning. Hyde’s house would have been soaked through to create a conflagration of this size. Given the number of emergency vehicles on the scene, the fire must have been called in half an hour ago or earlier.
The driver eased the sedan to a stop two hundred feet from the fire, close enough for them to feel the heat from the blaze as they stepped from the vehicle. Even as Henna watched, a section of roof collapsed into the churning guts of the building, sending up a fireworks display of popping sparks and burning bits of paper and fabric. The air was laced with the petrochemical stench of melting roof shingles, making Henna close his eyes when the wind shifted into his face. Two pumper trucks siphoned water from separate hydrants and showered the house with ballooning arcs, but still the place burned. Heat washed off the building in visible waves.
The structure was a total loss. The siding had burned through in places to reveal the skeletal fingers of the house’s framing. On the far side of the house had stood a chimney, but all that remained was a seven-foot stump. The rest of it lay across the charred lawn in an elongated pile of debris.
Henna saw his theories burning in the fire. Without Hyde, there was no case and all the theorizing in the world wouldn’t change that fact. He had no doubt that when the house cooled, they would discover the undersecretary’s body amid the ruins.
“You’re Henna?” The question came from a fireman much older than those fighting the blaze. His face was weathered like tree bark, and when he pulled off his helmet, his hair was pure white. “The cop at the barricade radioed me you were here. Mind telling me why the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is here with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs?”
Henna figured the man was the commander of Fairfax’s fire department. He put out his hand. “I can’t tell you the particulars right now, I’m sorry.” The fireman had a tight grip, his hands deeply callused. “Anyone in there?”