“I’m sorry I put you in that position,” Connolly said.
“I just wanted you to understand.”
“Tanya,” Connolly said. “Was it Emmett Kalmbach, by any chance?”
“I–I can’t answer that,” Jackson said.
But she didn’t have to.
“You’re in luck,” Bruce Ardsley said. He was beaming.
“Dragan Stefanovic is the shooter?”
He nodded.
“How certain can you be?”
“Ninety-seven percent probability of true verification.”
“Bruce, that’s fantastic.” Take that, Kalmbach, she thought.
“The probability on the other one’s lower, though.”
“The other one?”
“Maybe seventy-eight percent probability.”
“Which other one are you talking about?”
Ardsley swiveled around in his chair, tapped at a keyboard, and a large photographic image came up on the flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall in front of her. It was a close-up of a dark-haired man in his 40s wearing a dark, expensive-looking business suit. He had flat, Slavic facial features.
“Where was this taken?”
“A surveillance camera outside a men’s room in Concourse D at Dulles.”
“Who is it?” she said.
“Nigel Sedgwick.”
“Who?”
Ardsley struck another key, and a second photo popped onto the screen next to the first.
“A British businessman. From Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire. That’s England. Or so his passport said. Here in D.C. on a buying trip for his hot-tub business.”
“Looks like it was taken at passport control,” she said.
Ardsley turned around, shrugged modestly, smiled. “Right.”
“How’d you get it?”
“I hacked into Homeland Security. Well, not hacked, really. Just used a backdoor into Customs and Border Protection’s database.”
“So who is this guy really?”
A third image appeared on the screen next to the other two. She immediately recognized the photo as one of the mug shots of Agim Rugova’s men that Padlo had e-mailed her.
“Vukasin,” she said.
“He entered the country last night on a British Airways flight from Paris. Using a British passport.”
Connolly nodded. “I guess Homeland Security doesn’t have facial-recognition software, huh? Or they’d have stopped him.”
“Oh, they have the software, believe me,” he said. “Plus, this guy Vukasin is on one of their watch lists.”
“Maybe their software isn’t as good as ours.”
“Or maybe someone knew who he was and let him in anyway.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“A lot of what Homeland Security does makes no sense,” Ardsley said.
“What are you saying — you think he was flagged as a bad guy but let through anyway?”
“Yes,” Ardsley said. “That’s what I think. But I’m only a video tech, so what do I know?”
“Jesus,” she breathed.
“So let me ask you something,” he said.
She turned away from the flat-screen. “Go ahead.”
“You ever free for a drink?”
“You don’t give up, do you?” Connolly said.
He pointed at the ripped motivational poster on the wall. “Persistence,” he said with a sheepish smile.
As Connolly approached her cubicle, she saw from a distance that a man was sitting in her chair. Another man was standing next to him.
The man in the chair was Emmett Kalmbach. The man standing beside him was tall and wiry, with horn-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline. She had no idea who he was.
Then the standing man noticed her, muttered something, and Kalmbach turned slowly around.
“Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, getting to his feet. “Allow me to introduce Richard Chambers from DHS.”
She shook hands with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses. His handshake was cold and limp.
“Dick Chambers,” the man said. He didn’t smile.
“M.T. Connolly.”
“Dick is a Regional Director of Homeland Security,” Kalmbach said.
“A pleasure to meet you.” Connolly kept her tone and face neutral, as if she’d never heard of him. But in fact she had. His background was almost clichéd diplomatic track: Yale, OCS, and then State Department. He’d been posted to some of the worst hotspots in the world. After September 11, he’d gone to Homeland Security, resolved that no terrorist would ever show his face in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Chambers wasn’t popular among the feds — an abrasive façade over an ego that wouldn’t quit — but he was a man who took on fires that nobody else wanted to go near. And, without any hesitation to risk his own hide, he got them extinguished. That he was involved made her uneasy. Real uneasy. “Now will someone explain to me what’s going on?” she asked.
“We can talk in the conference room,” Kalmbach said.
“Agent Connolly,” the man from Homeland Security said, “we seem to have a communications problem that I hope we can all work out in person.” He’d taken a seat at the head of the mahogany conference table, wordlessly indicating his place in the hierarchy.
“What sort of ‘communication problem’?” she asked.
“Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, “what happened at Dulles Airport falls cleanly within the jurisdiction of the Virginia police. I thought I made it clear that the situation there is of no concern to the Bureau.”
That wasn’t what he’d said, of course. He seemed to be performing for the man from DHS. But she knew better than to argue with Emmett Kalmbach over what he had or had not told her.
“Actually,” Connolly said, holding up the CD that Bruce Ardsley had made for her, “I think it’s very much of concern to the Bureau. Our own facial-recognition software has identified two Serbian war criminals who’ve entered the country illegally, one of them using a false British passport under the name—”
“Why are you trying to locate Harold Middleton?” Chambers interrupted, taking the disk from her hand.
“Because he’s a material witness,” Connolly said. “In an international case that involves a triple homicide in Warsaw, and another one, or possibly by now two—”
“Was I not absolutely clear?” Kalmbach said, his face flushing, but the DHS man put a hand on Kalmbach’s sleeve, apparently to silence him.
“Agent Connolly,” Chambers said softly, “Harold Middleton’s file is blue-striped.”
She looked at him, then nodded. A blue stripe indicated that a file was sealed for national-security reasons. Part of Middleton’s military record had been designated as codeword-classified. That meant a level above even top secret.
“Why?” she asked finally.
Kalmbach scowled and said nothing. The man from Homeland replied, “How do I put this in a language you’ll understand? This is above your pay grade, Agent Connolly.”
“Meaning I’m off the case?” she blurted out.
“No, Agent Connolly,” Chambers said. “Meaning that there is no case.”
Chapter Ten
Jim Fusilli
Leonora Tesla stepped out of the yellow taxi on the busy northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 35th Street, and hustled into Macy’s. She emerged with her hair trimmed short and punked, wearing a black button-down blouse with the collar curled high, black slacks and black flats — in many ways, the opposite of what she wore 24 hours earlier when she killed Günter Schmidt. A new black-leather shoulder bag, tucked tight under her arm, held a change of underwear and what remained from the moment she steered Schmidt’s body toward the ravaging hyenas down in the wadi: her sunglasses, cash, credit cards and passport, her portfolio and her most valued possession, her fully loaded iPod, a gift from Harold Middleton.