I hung back and looked around as he headed toward the kitchen.
“Must be a real drag working on the weekend,” he called back. “That’s the one thing about my job. At least I’ve got a nice regular schedule.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, fingering through his mail. It was out on an end table, mostly bills, mostly unopened. A dusty collection of salt and pepper shakers sat in a curio cabinet on the wall. “Speaking of schedules, do you keep records of the custodial staff’s time at the school?” I asked.
O’Shea didn’t answer. An announcer on the TV hooted out his approval for a double play that had just gone down. And I knew right then that something was wrong.
“George?”
When I got to the kitchen, it was empty. No George anywhere. The back door was wide open, and I could see O’Shea out on the lawn, scrambling over his chain-link fence toward the street.
The son of a bitch was making a run for it.
THERE IS NOTHING that pisses me off like a footrace I don’t want. When I ran out of George O’Shea’s house a half second later, I think I bent his screen door right off the frame.
O’Shea was a big guy. The kids at Branaff called him Hagrid behind his back. But he was a lot faster than he looked. By the time I was out on the street sprinting after him, he was halfway up the block. Clearly he had a good reason to run.
“Don’t do this, George!”
A guy raking his leaves had already taken out his phone when I passed. “Call the police!” I yelled at him. I noticed he took my picture first.
Two kids on the sidewalk screamed at me and pedaled their Big Wheels like crazy, trying to keep up.
The top of the block ended in a cul-de-sac. O’Shea cut between two of the houses and kept going.
When I caught sight of him again, he was trying to scale a tall cedar fence in somebody’s backyard. He had to jump a couple times before he got a grip on the top of it and started pulling himself up.
Then the plank in his hand cracked. He slipped back down a few feet — and that’s when I caught up with him.
I got hold of his ankle before he could muscle all the way over, and I pulled him right off the top of the fence.
That brought him down fast — but he took me down with him, too.
And he wasn’t done yet.
My cuffs were out, just as O’Shea popped up onto one knee and elbowed me hard under the chin. My head snapped back. I tasted blood. In fact, it was probably the blood that helped me add a little speed and leverage to the right hook I gave him in return. That was enough to knock him back on his ass again.
This time I took out my Glock.
“Roll over, facedown! Hands on your head!” I told him.
He seemed half out of his mind. Even now, he started up at me again, but only until he saw the gun a few inches from his face.
“Don’t, George. Please — don’t,” I said.
It was like all the fight drained out of him at once. Even his face dropped, and he just melted back down to the ground.
When I put the cuffs on him, he started to cry.
“What have I done?” he kept saying over and over. “Oh God, what have I done?”
That was my question exactly.
THE BACKTRACKING AND denials started in my car and continued over the next several hours.
O’Shea was taken directly into FBI custody. I drove him in myself, right through the sally port at the side entrance to the Washington field office.
From there, it’s a straight shot back to the interview rooms on the ground floor. Word was kept tight. There would be no announcement of the arrest yet. Not until we knew more from O’Shea.
A forensic unit was dispatched to his house in Riverdale. Another one went to his office at Branaff, to see what they could turn up. There was no question that O’Shea was hiding something. It was only a matter of finding out what it was.
Around seven o’clock, we got word back from the team out in Riverdale. A Dell laptop had been found in O’Shea’s master bedroom closet. It was loaded with pornographic images, most of them involving children. George O’Shea seemed to have a thing going for little girls, kids as young as three and four.
It was stomach-turning stuff, but as a piece of evidence, this was more than enough to hold him. By the time Peter Lindley arrived, straight from LX1 in Langley, adrenaline was running high in the observation room.
“What have we got here?” he said, taking a file from one of the assistant special agents in charge.
“George O’Shea,” the ASAC told him. “He’s the head of maintenance at the Branaff School —”
“I know who he is, for God’s sake. What have we got?” Lindley said. He seemed to be in his usual bad mood. Several other agents stepped out of the way to make a space for him at the one-way glass.
On the other side, O’Shea was sitting with the Bureau supervisor from the Child Abduction Unit, Ken Mugatande. They’d been talking for two hours straight now.
O’Shea was slumped forward, with his head resting on his clenched fists.
“He’s ready to admit the porn’s his,” I told Lindley. “But he swears up and down that he doesn’t know anything about Ethan and Zoe’s disappearance.”
“He’s begging for a polygraph,” the ASAC said.
Lindley turned and glared at the agent. “This is the guy whose office is twenty-five feet from that tunnel under the school?” Nobody answered. It was a rhetorical question. “So what the hell are we doing here? Let’s get him down to the polygraph room — now!”
THE FIELD OFFICE’S polygraph room looks a lot like the other interview rooms — small table, two chairs, plain white walls, and a big one-way mirror. If anything, the observation space is smaller. A dozen of us squeezed in there to watch the interview.
“What is your name?”
“George Luther O’Shea.”
“What is your address?”
“It’s 1109 Edgewood Road, Riverdale, Maryland.”
O’Shea had asked for this, but he looked even more miserable than before. He was wired up with pneumographs around his chest and abdomen, a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and two finger clips, all feeding into a laptop on the table.
The polygrapher was Sue Pilgrim, a forensic psychologist out of the Hoover Building.
Sue sat at a right angle to O’Shea and just behind him, where he couldn’t see her during the test. Her first several questions were a standard opening battery, mostly lie-proof stuff like name and address, to establish a baseline. After that, she moved on to the meat of the interview.
“Have you ever knowingly downloaded a pornographic image of a child to your own computer?” Pilgrim asked.
“Yeah,” O’Shea said, after a shaky sigh.
“Have you ever knowingly uploaded a pornographic image of a child from your computer to the Internet?”
“No,” he said.
Both times, Agent Pilgrim nodded. As far as she and her machine were concerned, he’d just told the truth.
Then she asked, “Have you ever conspired with any group or individual from another country to commit an illegal act here in the United States?”
“What?” O’Shea swiveled on his seat to look at her. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”
She was talking about Al Ayla. This was the other possibility we had to confront. O’Shea could have had some tie to The Family, if they were in fact behind the kidnapping. Maybe he was their contact at the school. Maybe they had paid him off to be their “inside” person.
Agent Pilgrim responded to the outburst with quiet professionalism. “George, I just need you to answer the questions as simply as possible. Do you want to take a break before we go on?”
“No,” he said, turning back around to face front. “I just … I don’t understand where you’re going with this. What do you mean … contact with other countries?”
“I’ll ask again,” she said, and repeated her question verbatim. This time, O’Shea answered with a simple no, and
again, Pilgrim nodded.
Next, she opened a file and set an eight-by-ten photo on the table in front of him.
It was a mug shot of Ray Pinkney, the drugged-out van driver from the morning of the kidnapping.
“Do you recognize this man?” Pilgrim asked.
I watched O’Shea’s face as he looked at the photo. There was no lateral movement in his eyes, no physical signs of evasion or lying that I could see at all.
“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” he said.
“Do you know where Zoe Coyle is right now?” Pilgrim asked.
“No,” he said.
“Do you know where Ethan Coyle is right now?”
“No!”
Every one of his answers got a nod from Agent Pilgrim. It was starting to add up.
It’s not that polygraphs are foolproof. They’re a guide, and nothing more than that. But even so, we seemed to be heading toward an unwanted conclusion here. You could feel it in the room.
George O’Shea wasn’t our guy. He didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping.
THEY WERE JUST finishing up with the polygraph when I got an unexpected phone call. There weren’t many people who could have pulled me out of that room just then, but here was one of them.
“Detective Cross, it’s Nina Friedman from the White House. Could you please hold for the First Lady?”
Just like that — a direct call from Regina Coyle. Sure. Happens every day. Of course I could hold for the First Lady.
I stepped out and into one of the empty interview rooms. Just as I was pulling the door closed behind me, Mrs. Coyle came on the line.
“What can I do for you, ma’am?” I asked.
“I’m wondering what you can tell me about this George O’Shea person,” she said.
The question caught me off guard. I wasn’t completely surprised that she’d already gotten word on O’Shea, but still, this put me in a tight spot.
“Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Coyle, but how much do you already know?” I said.
“I know who he is. I know that he’s been arrested. And I know the reason why. What I’d like to know is what you think of him.”
“I can tell you he just passed a polygraph test,” I told her. “But that’s not impossible to fake. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“Yes, but what do you think, Alex? You’re my eyes and ears on this. I’m not looking for absolutes,” she said. “Just … anything to give us hope.”
The more I knew Mrs. Coyle, the more I found myself relating to her, parent to parent. I probably said more than I should have.
“I don’t think he knows where Ethan and Zoe are. I’m sorry.”
“I see,” she said.
There was a long, silent moment on the phone. I could hear people out in the hall, leaving the observation room. Presumably O’Shea would be transferred to the U.S. marshals’ custody and taken to the arraignment courts from here. Then over to the central cell block after that. The pornography charge alone would put him in jail.
“Mrs. Coyle?” I said.
“I’m still here.”
“As long as I have you, I’d like to ask a question about the morning of the kidnapping. If it’s all right.”
“Of course,” she said. I think any distraction from the disappointing news was welcome at this point.
“Do you know if Zoe brought her phone to school that morning?” I asked.
“Her phone?”
“There’s been some talk among the kids about a texting incident last year. Involving Zoe. I just wondered if —”
“Zoe doesn’t have a phone,” Mrs. Coyle said. “Not as far as I know. Even if Secret Service would allow it, her father and I wouldn’t. And believe me, we’ve had our battles about this one.”
My mind started turning over everything I’d heard that day. Everything I’d learned about Ethan and Zoe from the beginning.
“Is it possible she could have gotten a phone on her own? Something she kept secret?” I asked.
“Of course. This is Zoe we’re talking about,” she said. “She knows how to get what she wants. Honestly, everyone likes to talk about how brilliant Ethan is, but if you ask me, my daughter’s the one with a future in politics.”
I liked that word right now. Future. It was a good thing to keep in mind.
“I trust you’re going to look into this,” Mrs. Coyle said.
“Absolutely,” I told her. “I already am.”
AT ELEVEN FIFTEEN that Saturday night, Ned Mahoney and a handpicked team of HRT agents set out from the MPD Third District Heliport in an unmarked FBI van. Mahoney preferred to run his ops in daylight — ultimately at dawn. But this detail was what it was and it had to happen now.
His order had come in to Quantico ninety minutes ago. The arrest plan described four suspects, all Saudi, holed up at a motel just south of Silver Spring, Maryland. Presumably they were Al Ayla, but there was nothing about that in the fax Mahoney had received.
He rode shotgun and looked over the motel diagram as they drove north, at full speed, through the city.
The motel room, number 122, was fairly straightforward: large bedroom, alcove, closet, bathroom. The only way in or out was the door at the front, accessible directly from the parking lot. The FBI entry team would be small, just four agents.
“Command, this is Red Team. We’re on Sixteenth, heading north,” Mahoney radioed over to the command center, set up at an old taxi dispatch a few blocks from the target. “What’s the visual you have on the motel?”
“Copy that, Red Team,” the unit commander came back. “We’re all go on this end. It looks like everyone’s tucked in for the night.”
Advance had already come through and quietly cleared guests out of all the adjacent rooms. SWAT had the perimeter held down, with tactical teams on three different rooftops around the motel. MPD and emergency services were both on standby.
HRT would go in first, as always.
Once the van came into range, Mahoney flipped his goggles down. He gave a thumbs-up to the three agents in back, who flashed the same sign. Samuels, Totten, and Behrenberg were all good to go. The unit was outfitted in full battle uniform — black Nomex flight suits, load-bearing vests, Kevlar helmets, and MP5s. It was heavy gear, enough to slow you down, but the adrenaline would more than compensate.
Before the vehicle even came to a stop, the doors were open and they were out. The team hit the ground running in a single-file beeline for Room 122.
“This is Red Team,” Mahoney radioed on the fly. “We’re going in!”
This had to be Al Ayla.
“FBI! OPEN UP!” Mahoney shouted.
At the same time, a forty-pound battering ram took out the motel room door in one swing. That was the extent of their “knock and announce.”
Before Mahoney was even inside, he saw the bathroom door slam closed at the far end of the otherwise empty room. He went for it, with Samuels at his back.
Totten and Behrenberg fanned out, checking the beds, the closet, the pile of luggage in the corner. A string of white laundry was suspended across the alcove. These people had been living here for a while.
Mahoney’s boot heel was all he needed to obliterate the cheap bathroom lock. The door flew open and he found them there, all four, cowering inside.
It looked a hell of a lot like a family to him. There was a mother, father, and two teenaged boys. The parents barricaded the younger two with their bodies, while the boys squatted in the tub.
All four of them had trickles of blood running down their chins. Oh, Jesus God!
“Hands! Show me your hands!” Mahoney screamed, waving his MP5 in their faces. Samuels repeated the order in Arabic, but nobody moved. They clutched at one another, watching with dark eyes that were wide, but not scared. These people were ready to die.
“Command, this is Red Team. We’ve found all four suspects in the bathroom. I can’t say for sure, but I think they just downed suicide capsules. Cyanide, probably. Requesting immediate
medical assistance.”
“We need these people alive,” the unit commander came back.
No shit, Mahoney thought. The whole operation was worth only as much as the intel it uncovered. He motioned Samuels farther inside. “See if you can get some vitals.”
The mother and one of the boys started to convulse first. When Samuels tried to reach them, the other two scrambled over to get in his way. All four were wheezing badly, as if their breath was coming through the tiniest of straws.
“Where are the damn EMTs?” Mahoney radioed.
But then Totten called out from the other room.
“Hold that thought, boss,” he said. “We’ve got another problem.”
Mahoney turned around to see Totten on his stomach, looking at something under one of the beds.
“I’ve got eyeballs on some kind of gray brick,” he said. “Looks wired. I think we need to get the hell out of here pronto!”
Mahoney didn’t wait. “Totten, Behrenberg! Go — now! Samuels, grab one of these people. Whoever’s going to make it.”
Samuels reached for one of the boys. When he did, the mother put her hand in his way. She smiled, her teeth stained bright cherry red with oxygenated blood. In her shaking fist was a small cylindrical detonator.
“Oh, Jesus —”
Instinct took over. Mahoney shoved Samuels farther inside and swung the door closed behind him — just as the blast went off.
The door came right back at them, off its hinges, and knocked both of the agents down.
In the small space, they fell on top of the family in a blind tangle of bodies. Plaster shook down from the ceiling. A long crack ran down the wall, as water began shooting out from the showerhead connection.
Mahoney struggled back to his feet. The bedroom was in flames.
He couldn’t see Totten or Behrenberg anywhere.
Hopefully that meant they were already clear, and not — gone. The explosion had blown out the entire front of the room, picture window and all.
“Go, go, go!” He pulled Samuels off the floor and shoved him out the door.