SEVENTY
Haaris parked at the Dover Mall just past lunchtime and walked directly into Macy’s department store. It was a weekday and the place was almost empty. By now if McGarvey had enlisted Rencke’s help, they could know about the incident at the storage center, including the car and its Maryland tags. If Rencke’s wife had also become involved it was possible, though unlikely, in his estimation, that she could have retasked one of the Flybaby satellites to follow him.
But that led to a number of other unlikely, though disturbing, possibilities. They knew that three nuclear warheads were missing from Quetta. And if they had traced him here they might have figured out that the weapons had arrived from Pakistan.
A host of what ifs.
He had passed the entrance to Dover Air Force Base just off Delaware Route 1 a couple of miles back, but there hadn’t been any unusual activity. No helicopters circling. No police cars or military cops parked alongside the road leading to the main gate.
In any event, if he was cornered with no way out he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the SIM card in his phone and make the call. It would be a waste of five years, but once again people in the U.S., and this time in Great Britain also, would feel the same sense of vulnerability that they’d felt after 9/11. No place would ever seem safe again.
He went to the men’s department, where he bought a light-colored poplin jacket, and in another section a Nike baseball cap.
In a stall in the public restroom at the opposite end of the mall, he removed the tags and put the jacket on, zipping it all the way up.
Stuffing the hat inside the jacket he walked down the broad mall corridor to the Sears store, where he found an old-fashioned pay phone, called the number from memory of the City Cab Company and asked to be picked up outside JCPenney and taken to the Dover Downs Casino.
He walked back through the mall to JCPenney, and when the cab pulled up, he put on the cap and walked outside.
The man who had arrived in the Camry had disappeared, as had the man who’d walked through the mall wearing a jacket but no hat.
At Langley, Pete was with Otto in his suite of offices, when the satellite feed Louise had been sending them suddenly shut down. The phone rang, and it was she.
“The system’s malfunction alarm came up, so I had to pull out,” she said. “Is it Dover?”
“Yes, Mac was right,” Otto said. “He parked in front of Macy’s at a mall a couple of miles north of the base. We were waiting for him to come out.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can use the satellite any time soon. They’ll be revamping the malware system, and until I can get the bypass codes we’re out of luck.”
“Will they trace it back to Louise?” Pete asked.
Otto grinned. “No,” he said, at the same time his wife did.
He picked up the GPS signal from McGarvey’s phone, then called.
“I’m about thirty miles out,” McGarvey said. “Is he in Dover?”
“In the Dover Mall just north of the base. We’re waiting for him to come out.”
“There’s no reason for him to stop at a mall, except to ditch the Camry. He either walked away, or someone picked him up.”
“How about a cab?” Pete asked.
“That’s possible. It means he knows or suspects that we’re watching him, and he considered the likelihood probably from the beginning. He’s on his way now to pick up another car.”
“You think he’ll try to get on the base?” Pete asked.
“Guaranteed,” McGarvey said. “Call the commander and get me a pass.”
“We still have time to get a NEST team up there,” Otto said. “It’s worth a try.”
“If he so much as gets a hint that those people have shown up he’ll pull the trigger.”
“Maybe he will anyway,” Pete said.
“He’s got bigger targets in mind. Somehow he managed to get the three weapons shipped over, and they’re sitting in a warehouse or empty hangar somewhere on base waiting for him to pick them up. And from there he’ll take them probably to Washington and New York.”
“They’re sending back lots of military equipment out of Lahore now that most of the operations in Afghanistan have been shut down,” Pete said. “Rajput was helping him so it would have been fairly simple to slip three packages through. Shielded crates, maybe, even hidden in boxes of aircraft parts. Anything.”
“Medical waste,” Otto suggested. “Could be marked biohazard. I have a feeling that Dover doesn’t have the facilities to dispose of something like that, so it’d have to be shipped to a safe site somewhere.”
“Find out as much as you can,” McGarvey said. “It’s a good bet he’s going to get on base with the proper credentials and paperwork to pick up whatever they’re packaged in. And at this point I’d guess biohazardous material would be the most likely. The packages would be sealed, and no one would be tempted to open them.”
“We’re on it,” Otto said.
“I’ll be at the main gate in less than thirty minutes.”
Haaris paid off the cabby and went inside the casino, where he ditched the hat in a trash can. He had a cup of coffee in one of the snack bars, then bought an oversized dark blue sweatshirt printed with a pair of dice with a five and two showing, the casino’s name below them.
He left the jacket in the men’s room, pulled on the sweatshirt and went back outside, where he caught another cab, giving the driver a residential address on the west side of town just off Forrest Avenue.
Just before he got in the backseat, he looked to the southeast toward the base as a C-5M Super Galaxy troop transport made its approach into the pattern. NEST teams did not ride around in aircraft like that, but he was still worried that something was coming up on his six. McGarvey.
Ten minutes later the cabby pulled up in front of a ranch-style house with a two-car garage in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. It was a weekday, so husbands were at work and wives were either home doing housework or off shopping with friends, whatever housewives did during the week. He’d never wondered about Deborah’s schedule while he was away. But then, he’d never really given a damn about her.
The last time he’d been up here for a long weekend he’d taken the ten-year-old Chevy Tahoe out of the garage and washed it in the driveway. One of the neighbors came over to say hi, and they’d chatted about absolutely nothing for ten minutes until the poor bastard had wandered off.
Haaris came across as an okay neighbor who kept his place neat but was standoffish and hardly ever home. No wife, no kids or pets, probably a salesman on the road most of the time. He’d owned the house for three years and most of the time he arrived by cab, just like today. Nothing unusual. Ted Johnson is home again. Blend with the woodwork. Show them what they want to see. Just like the Messiah had.
Inside he made a quick inspection of every room, all the doors and windows, to make sure no one had been inside or had tried to get in since the last time he was here. There was dust on everything; no one had been here.
He changed into a long-sleeved white shirt and opened the garage door. The Tahoe started with no trouble, and he pulled out, closed the garage door for the last time and drove directly back to Forrest Avenue, traffic almost nonexistent compared to that in DC. Past the AAA offices, Forrest turned into State Road 8, and six miles out of town he came to what had once been a metal fabrication company behind a tall wire-mesh fence, but was now long since deserted.
He’d bought it through a shell company two years ago and had come out only once in person, at night. The one-story office building was set just off the road, behind it two fabrication buildings and a warehouse and parts inventory facility. The driveways were cracked, weeds growing everywhere.