He turned his phone on then pulled a scrap of paper from his wallet. He dialed the scrawled phone number, pressed send and listened. “No answer,” he said. He picked up Maggie’s cell phone, dialed the same number, and held it out so she could hear. After several rings she heard a voice say, “FBI.”
He hung up then stared again at the small chip that dangled from his phone. “I bet this redirected my calls.”
“It probably also tracked you,” Maggie said.
“I bet all my phones were fixed. My office would have been easy, and my apartment…” He glanced up at her then away.
Something in his eyes told her that whatever happened in his apartment had involved another woman. She felt a sudden hot flash of jealousy. To cover it, she stood and went to the sink.
Brent gripped the chip in his fingers ready to pull it out. “We have to assume they can still track us.”
“Don’t!” she said. “There’s a better way.” She told him she’d be right back then took the cell phone outside, climbed in her car and drove six blocks to Joe Spedowski’s house. It was three a.m., but Spud was recently divorced and lived alone. She went up on his porch and rang the buzzer. He jerked it open a moment later wearing threadbare pajama bottoms and scratching his hairy stomach. “DeVito!” he grumbled. “This better be good.”
“I need a favor.” She handed him the cell phone, said she needed him to keep it with him on his rounds.
“Lemme guess,” he said, as he turned it over and eyed the dangling chip. “It’s bugged.”
“I think it’s a tracking device.”
“If I should run into the trackee?”
“Wear your body armor. Call for backup.”
His eyes opened wide. “You gonna give me any more information?”
“Can’t.”
“You owe me one.”
“I owe you more than one.”
He scowled, closed the door, and she got back in her car. A few minutes later when she walked back into her kitchen, Brent was going through the entries in Reverend Turner’s address book. He pointed to one under the letter G—the initials GA and a number with a 212 area code. “Fred Wofford’s direct line at Genesis Advisors!” he said triumphantly.
Maggie came up behind him and rested her hands on his shoulders. She let them remain there. It felt selfish, almost wrong, but his muscle and bone felt so substantial and reassuring beneath her fingers. Suddenly, all the things that had pushed them apart seemed insignificant. “Come on,” she said, making her decision.
“Where to now?” Brent asked.
“Upstairs to bed. We need sleep.”
He looked up at her and raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think I was allowed.”
“I think you’re pretty harmless tonight.”
He managed a curious smile. “If I’m not?”
“Well… either way you’re at least going to hold me until the damn alarm goes off.”
He stood and put his arms around her. Neither of them spoke, and she folded her head into his chest and listened to the insistent thumping of his heart. They stood like that a long time. In spite of the night’s horrors, Maggie felt courage and strength begin to seep back into her bones, as though a rundown battery had suddenly been plugged into its charger.
FORTY-SEVEN
PROJECT SEAHAWK, NEWARK, NJ, JULY 1
ANN JENKINS SAT WITH HER arms folded, her fingernails tucked out of biting range beneath her armpits, as she glared at the papers arrayed in neat piles on her desk. She’d been sitting this way for the past hour and a half, struggling to ignore the fraying tempers and the exhausted faces of people working double and triple shifts, trying to understand what was happening.
She sat there in perfect stillness, back straight, trying to open her mind. Screw it, she decided after a few more minutes as she stood and started pacing. Nobody had invented the mantra that could take the place of a strong cigarette or at least a Hershey Bar with Almonds.
Of course—her typical luck—the candy machine downstairs was on the blink. At two a.m. nothing was open beside an all-night place about four blocks away, and she’d need an Uzi to shoot her way through the zombies on Newark’s streets at this hour of the morning. Since she didn’t have time to waste filling out paperwork on the resulting body count, she was staying put.
She stuck a finger in her mouth and tried to chew a piece of nail, but no luck, not even a sliver left to bite. She gave up and focused her eyes again on the pile topped by the CIA memo. Beneath it was everything she’d been able to dig up on the Wahaddi Brotherhood, which considering the CIA’s extremely negative view of the organization, wasn’t much. What she had, however, detailed the gradual choking off of the Brotherhood’s bank accounts in the years following 9/11, and also conveyed the strong suspicion that a major Saudi family with strong U.S. economic and political ties—name deleted—had been responsible for much or most of the funding.
The second pile, not really a pile but a single sheet of paper, contained the names of all the people she’d spoken with over the past day and a half as she tried to drum up support for DeVito’s thesis. She’d been rebuffed by her old compatriots at the FBI, by her superiors in Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorneys Office, by the White House staff, by members of the Committee to Re-elect the President, by the New York Mayor’s Office and the New York Chief of Police, as well as by the Boston and Charleston commands of Project Seahawk. Her barrage of phone calls had finally brought a harsh response from her superiors at Homeland Security, and now she was expressly forbidden to communicate her Condition Red to anyone else.
The third pile, and the one that troubled her most, consisted of several news items: the theft of over eight hundred million dollars a few days earlier, the murder of a wealthy Egyptian, an arson/murder in Rye, and a murder in a Manhattan parking garage. Underneath the clippings lay Maggie DeVito’s memo.
It was damn creative detective work, Jenkins thought, but her requests for wiretaps and surveillance had been turned down. The connections were too tenuous—pure speculation someone at the U.S. Attorney’s Office called them—and Biddle was too powerful. Still, Jenkins respected the way DeVito had followed her gut. All her instincts told her that DeVito was on the right path.
Unfortunately, it led straight into a political minefield. Anybody who went that way risked getting blown to pieces. She shook her head, continued pacing, and tried to bite another nail.
FORTY-EIGHT
LAMBERTVILLE, NJ, JULY 1
MOHAMMED CIRCLED THE SMALL HOUSE for the third time and listened to the sounds of the night all around. A dog barked in a yard somewhere. Once, a car sped past, not slowing. Mohammed’s own car was parked over a mile away, and he moved silently and carefully. The faint sound of a television leaked through the walls, as if someone was still watching, but he didn’t think they were. Maybe they’d fallen asleep, but he doubted that, too. Something felt wrong.
He’d noticed the broken pane in the back door on his first circuit, and he’d gone around twice more to make sure he wasn’t missing anything else. Now, he went up onto the back porch and tried the knob. The door was unlocked. His Marakov 9mm was already in his hand, and he stepped over the broken glass and tiptoed through the kitchen.
The downstairs was empty, and he crept up the stairs, his pistol centered on the landing. At the next to last step, the smell hit him, and he glanced to the right and saw the two sprawled bodies. He looked quickly at the other two rooms, found only emptiness, and then backtracked and left the house through the back door. On his way to his car he used his cell phone to call Abu Sayeed.