He smiled at her. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said with a smile that made some of the cold go away. “Can you tell me your name?”
She told him.
“Sweetheart, please stay with me,” he said. “I need to know your name.”
“Aafia,” she said, only this time, she could hear her real voice over the one in her head.
“Can you spell that for me?”
She thought. “I don’t think so,” she said. But she was such a good speller. Why not now?
“What’s your last name, sweetie?” the nice man asked.
“Janwari,” she said.
The face turned confused. “Excuse me?”
“That’s my name,” she said. At least she thought she did. “Aafia Janwari.”
The man said, “Oh, shit,” and then he went away. Aafia went away, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jonathan met FBI Director Irene Rivers for breakfast at the Maple Inn in Vienna, Virginia. A dive by most standards, it was a favorite hangout for the spooky community that had grown up around CIA headquarters, which sat just six miles north on Route 123-or, as it was called within the incorporated limits of the Town of Vienna, Maple Avenue. Jonathan had lost track of the number of clandestine meetings in the open he’d had here over the years, but combined, his didn’t account for one tenth of one percent of the cumulative secrets heard by the restaurant’s walls.
Because the food was good and inexpensive, and the beer was cold and plentiful, the Maple Inn’s clientele attracted the widest possible demographic, from soccer moms with kids to working folks of every color collar. Most important to Jonathan and the people he met with, the waitstaff knew when to take an order and when to stay away.
After their eggs, sausage, and toast had been delivered, and the pleasantries were out of the way, Jonathan got down to business.
“Thanks for coming to my rescue last night.”
She shrugged it off. “The Secret Service has an arrogant streak that pisses me off,” she said. “It feels good to put a thumb in their eye from time to time.”
“Will you be able to keep my name out of the press?”
Irene dipped a corner of her toast in the runny yolk of her egg and took a tiny bite. “The Prince George’s County Police arrested and released a fellow named Chuck Carr last night,” she said. “He was suspected of being one of the bridge shooters.”
“And Agent Clark?” Jonathan had already finished his eggs, and had shifted his concentration to making a sandwich with his sausage patty.
“He was never there,” Irene said, her face showing disappointment. “That was part of the deal with Ramsey Miller.” He was Irene’s counterpart at the Secret Service. “Letting the shooter run away was a big enough screw-up that he didn’t want the embarrassment.”
“So who arrested me? I mean who arrested Chuck Carr?”
“Does that really matter?”
Jonathan thought about that. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
Irene smiled. “Good. So, tell me who you saw on the bridge.”
He started from the beginning and went through it all. When he was done, he had Irene’s full attention.
“A girl, huh?” she said. “That’s a twist. You sure it wasn’t a long-haired boy?”
“A long-haired boy with boobs, maybe. My powers of observation are really pretty well-honed. Why?”
She shrugged. “It just runs counter to the profile. These mass-shooting types are always male.”
“I think I saw her drop her weapon,” Jonathan recalled. “Anything useful from that?”
“Generic Bushmaster, two-two-three caliber, modified for fully automatic fire. What concerns me is the marksmanship. Both of the gunmen-gun persons -knew what they were doing, and both were firing the same ammo from the same lot.”
“Do you know where they got it?”
“Not yet, but I’m not hopeful that we’ll learn a lot from that. Just a gut feeling. These guys feel trained to me.”
“Any connection to the mall shootings in Kansas last weekend?” Eight people had been murdered in that incident, with over thirty wounded. When the shooters had been cornered, they’d killed themselves rather than being taken into custody.
“Officially, no. Unofficially, absolutely. They were both invisible teens with jihadist propaganda in their pockets.”
“Arab?”
“Not hardly. One of them had red hair. But not all Muslims are Arab.”
“Are you thinking terrorist cell?”
Irene’s eyes grew wide as she feigned insult. “Good God, Digger. We don’t use the T-word for this. The president has made it clear that there will be no domestic terrorist attacks on his watch.”
Jonathan chuckled. “What are we calling it, then?”
“The last I heard, they were ‘unconnected random acts of violence.’ ” She used finger quotes for the last part.
“Needs work,” Jonathan said. “Way too many syllables.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem. Too many syllables.”
A moment passed in silence before Jonathan said, “You should know that Security Solutions has launched our own investigation into the shootings.”
Irene paused in the middle of a sip of coffee. “Please don’t do that,” she said. “I don’t need you exercising your grudge muscles right now.”
“It’s not about me,” Jonathan said. “Of the twelve killed and sixteen wounded on the bridge, three were friends or associates of my investigators.”
She scowled. “How is that possible?”
He shrugged. “The Washington Metro Area is really just a small town with a lot of people in it. My folks don’t ask stuff like this very often. I can’t say no to them. It’ll all be pro bono.”
“I’m not worried about the money-I wouldn’t pay you anyway. I worry about tainted evidence.” She held up her hand before he could respond. “And before you go into denial mode, remember how long we’ve worked together. I’ve never seen anyone who can taint evidence like you can.”
Jonathan resisted the temptation to point out that a not insignificant amount of the work she was referring to was performed at her request. “This won’t be the clandestine side of the shop,” he said. “It’ll all be by the book.”
Irene Rivers was one of very few people on the planet who knew the dark side of Security Solutions. To the rest of the world, it was an investigation firm that worked for some of the most prestigious corporate names in the world.
She wearily closed her eyes. “What can you possibly bring to the table that won’t already be brought by a dozen government agencies?”
“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe a lot. The only thing I know is that I can’t say no to my staff on this one. If I did, they’d just do it anyway. Doing something helps them cope. Makes them feel empowered, I guess.”
Irene’s phone rang in the pocket of her suit jacket. She issued a deep sigh as she reached for it. “Well, I can’t order you not to,” she said. “But please show restraint. If we find the not-terrorists who are committing these unconnected random acts of violence, I will shit all over you if so much as a speck of dust is rendered inadmissible because of something done by you or yours.”
Into the phone: “Director Rivers.”
Jonathan made a show of not listening even as he zoned in on every word. But she didn’t speak. Instead, she just listened and her face darkened. “Okay,” she said at last. “I can be in the office in a half hour with lights and siren. Assemble the section heads and the SAC in Detroit for a video conference at ten. Meanwhile, get Lee and Jeff on the line. I’ll talk to them from the car.”
When she pushed the disconnect button, she shot a pained smirk toward Jonathan. “Be sure to watch the news over the next couple of hours,” she said. “A jihadist just bombed an elementary school in Detroit.”
As Christyne waited for the gunman to return, the temperature in the tiny room soared past sweltering into the range of frightening-easily ninety degrees, if not hotter. The wall on the far side of the room from the door was too hot to touch, leading her to believe that there must not be any insulation at all between the furnace and the concrete block wall. The best she could figure out was that they used the furnace only during the day, and let the fire die at night.
Or, it could be that the heat was a form of torture?