Will we ever see our children again? Tariq wondered. It wasn’t a question he allowed himself too often, but all this waiting around was driving him crazy. It felt good to get up and leave their stuffy hotel room for a little while.
Outside, the streets were almost empty. On Twelfth Street they had trouble finding anything acceptable to eat. They passed McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, and then Taco Bell, whatever it was they sold there. What would bells taste like?
“Junk food and nothing else,” Hala said with derision. “Welcome to America.”
They were standing beneath an overhang to an office building, when a man suddenly stepped out from the shadows. He had a pistol in his hand and waved it at them. “Give me the pocketbook. Wallet. Loose change, watches,” he growled.
Hala put her arms across her chest and spoke in a high-pitched voice. “Please, don’t hurt us. We’ll give you our money — of course. No problem there. Just don’t hurt us!”
“Shoot you both dead, motherfuckers!” said the thief.
In their country, there were few men as desperate as this, Hala thought. A criminal like him would have his hand cut off if he were caught.
“No problem, no problem,” she answered, nodding. She offered up her knockoff Coach handbag with one hand, and then with the other — pepper spray! She doused the young fiend’s eyes with it.
He screeched and raised both hands to his face, trying to scrub away the burning poison. But his pain was only just starting. Hala dropped the spray and easily grabbed his gun.
She was so angry now. She sent a sharp kick to the boy’s kneecap, buckling it in the wrong direction. He went down screaming, and she kicked at his chest, fracturing a few ribs while she was at it.
Hala’s movements were fast and instinctual and athletic. She never seemed to be more than a foot or two away from the boy. He moaned on the ground — until her foot snapped into his throat. She kicked him in the forehead. The jaw. She broke bone there, too.
“Don’t kill him!” Tariq said, placing a hand on her arm.
“I’m not going to,” she said, and she stepped back. “A dead body would raise too many questions. We mustn’t draw attention. Not yet.” She leaned down to speak directly to the boy on the ground. “But I could have killed you — easily! Remember that the next time you put a gun in somebody’s face.”
They left the moaning boy in the shadows and crossed the street, then hurried back to the Wayfarer. There was nothing decent to eat out there anyway. This country was like the desert — just an arid wasteland that ought to be destroyed.
Without a doubt, it would be soon.
THE FBI’S STRATEGIC information operations center was overflowing with somber, stressed-out police personnel that Sunday afternoon. This was a full-court press if there ever was one. The main briefing theater on the fifth floor of the Hoover Building was standing room only.
Ned Mahoney rocked back on the heels of his black boots and tried to take the situation in. He could feel exhaustion taking over his body, but his mind was running full tilt. Odds were good that everyone in the room felt the same way. Ethan and Zoe Coyle had been missing for fifty-two hours and twenty-nine minutes, according to the red-digit count clock on the wall.
The Bureau director himself, Ron Burns, had insisted it go up and stay up, front and center, until they got the kids back. One way or the other.
There were live camera feeds from the Branaff School playing on several of the big screens, and area maps of a fifty-mile radius of Washington. Some of those had blinking red flags on them, though Mahoney wasn’t sure what they meant. The Bureau was operating like the well-oiled octopus it could be, with everyone on a strictly need-to-know basis.
The briefing came to order as soon as Director Burns arrived, trailing half a dozen harried-looking ADs and addressing the room even as he came in the side door at the front of the theater.
“Okay, I want a rundown from section heads right now,” he said. “Have we got Counterterrorism here yet? Ops Two?”
“Over here, sir.” Terry Marshall, the deputy section chief from that branch, held up her hand and hurried to the front. When she pointed a small remote at the wall of screens, Mahoney was surprised to see two grisly morgue photos come up. They were from the double suicide at Dulles.
“Farouk and Rahma Al Zahrani,” Marshall said. “Both Saudi citizens, educated at UCLA. He taught in the physics department at King Saud University; she worked for a small import-export house in Riyadh. No criminal records, no known criminal or terrorist associations, no known aliases.
“We’ve double-checked all threat lists, repeat, all, and they’re not on any of them. Same goes for every other passenger on their flight.”
“Yes, and?” Burns said. Thirty seconds in the room, and already he was impatient and demanding of his staff. Burns was infamous around the Bureau for the line “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother to come in on Sunday.”
“On paper, these are still separate incidents,” Marshall reported. “But the timing is suspect, to say the least. The Al Zahranis flew in Thursday afternoon, approximately eighteen hours before Zoe and Ethan disappeared. Given that nobody’s claimed responsibility for the abduction, or for the Al Zahranis, for that matter, we can’t afford to rule out a connection between the two.”
The room went quiet for several seconds. This was exactly the problem — since the twenty-four-hour mark had come and gone, the silence was killing them.
“Okay, what else?” Burns demanded. “Where are we with the driver of that van?”
Matt Salvorsen from the DC field office took Marshall’s place at the front of the room.
“So far, his story checks out,” Salvorsen said. He brought up an image of a Maryland driver’s license. The name on it was Ray Pinkney. The picture was of the driver.
“We’ve been over his home computer, and he did in fact receive a private IM from this ‘NE1NE1’ character. Contact was made four days before the abduction.”
“Which my ten-year-old granddaughter could have faked,” Burns said.
“Yes, sir,” Salvorsen answered. “Even so, we don’t believe that Pinkney had the means to pull off the larger operation. He’s kind of …”
“Thick?”
“Something like that, sir. In any case, we’re sitting on him twenty-four/seven at the hospital. He knows he’s up a creek now, and we’re fairly confident he’s giving us everything he’s got.”
“Who else talked to him?” Burns said. “Besides EMTs and hospital staff.”
“Secret Service Agent Findlay,” Salvorsen said. “He’s been temporarily decommissioned. And then Detective Cross, from MPD’s Major Case Squad. He managed to interview Pinkney before the Bureau took jurisdiction.”
Mahoney looked up from his notes when he heard Cross’s name. He was surprised to find Director Burns looking right back at him.
“Ned, you know Alex Cross pretty well?”
“Sure,” Mahoney said.
“Get him in on this, but light duty. We don’t need any more chiefs. Just close enough to keep an eye on him. Don’t tell him anything you don’t need to. I don’t want MPD in our way. Understood?”
Mahoney nodded several times, trying not to say what he was thinking — that Alex deserved better than this. “Sir, Cross was instrumental in the Soneji case —”
“Not looking for your opinion right now. I respect Cross. Just get it done, please. We don’t want MPD involved in this, and Cross is MPD!” Burns said briskly.
Mahoney gave the only answer there was to give at that point. “Yes, sir. Will do.”
Freeze out Alex.
ALREADY, THE HIGH-ENERGY director was onto something else on his busy agenda. A crew-cut assistant, female, had just come into the briefing theater, and she whispered in Burns’s ear. Didn’t seem like good news. What was happening now?
At the same time, two Secret Service agents entered from the back, strode up the center aisle, and took a position at the fron
t.
Two more agents appeared in each of the rear corners. Something was definitely up. What?
“On your feet!” Burns said, and everyone rose — just as the president and First Lady entered the room.
President Coyle looked exhausted but somehow had pulled himself together in a dark blue suit and gray tie. Mrs. Coyle, likewise, was camera ready, but anyone could see the stress and pain in her red, puffy eyes, and the sharp lines on her face.
Good God, Mahoney thought, to live this unfolding tragedy in front of the whole world. Your kids missing. No word from whoever took them.
“Sit, please,” the president said, and waited for everyone to settle down. Finally, he spoke again. “Regina and I just wanted to come and thank you all for everything you’re doing,” he went on. “Obviously, we’re not speaking with the press, but if there are any questions while we’re here, we can answer them. Feel free to ask anything. Please. You can be candid, and you can be honest.”
“Mr. President,” Burns cut in from the side. “We can meet privately with section heads, and then get you both out of here as fast as possible. They’ll have questions.”
“Fine,” the president said. “Then just one other thing.”
He walked over to one of the freestanding whiteboards in the room, picked up a green dry-erase marker, and wrote down ten digits. Then he reached into his pocket and held up a small blue phone.
Mahoney felt a ripple of surprise, even shock, run through the room. The two agents at the front exchanged a look as well. This was clearly news to them, alarming news. A breach of not only protocol, but security.
“My detail probably won’t let me keep this phone now, but at a minimum, the nearest active-duty agent to me will have it at all times,” Coyle said. “If anyone on this team has a time-sensitive question that Regina or I could answer, or any exigent reason at all for reaching us with information about our children, that’s the number to use.”
It was an extraordinary gesture, unlike anything Mahoney had ever seen a president do before. Of course, it was also wildly off protocol. He wondered if — or when — his security brass would put the kibosh on it, and whether they’d actually tell the president when they did.
For the meantime, Director Burns seemed to take it at face value. “Memorize it,” he told the room. “This is the first and last time that number appears in print.”
Then he gestured to the president and First Lady, and everyone was back on their feet as the entourage left through a glass door at the front, headed for the smaller conference center in the rear.
The Coyles’ drop-by had lasted a couple of minutes, if that. Already Mahoney was turning the appearance over in his head, looking at it from different angles.
There was always another angle, wasn’t there? The pretense of rallying the troops played out pretty well, but it seemed thin under the circumstances. This was a man who brought the world to his doorstep, literally, every day. And to say the least, this was no ordinary day. Security had to be at an all-time high. So why bring the president over here unnecessarily? Why now?
Part of the explanation — the easy half, anyway — was obvious. Someone at the top wasn’t reporting everything they knew to the larger group. That was a given. But what was it? What had changed? What did they know? Did they already know who was behind the kidnapping?
Agent Mahoney had never aspired to be at the pinnacle of any FBI organizational charts, but that didn’t stop his mind from running all the time, or curiosity from burning a hole in his brain whenever he was on the outside looking in.
So what the hell was the director telling the president and First Lady in that conference room right now?
“SIR. MA’AM. PLEASE. if you could have a seat,” Director Burns said as he motioned the president and First Lady to the long conference table in the center of the room. Executive AD Peter Lindley was closing all the vertical blinds on the windows and doors. A single Secret Service agent took his post inside, while the rest of the traveling entourage waited in the corridor.
“What’s going on, Ron?” Edward Coyle asked. At the same time, he laid his hand over his wife’s shaking fingers. “Obviously something’s happened. You’d better tell us right now. I’m serious. No politics, no games. Not this time.”
Burns stayed on his feet. “First, let me emphasize that we can’t fully trust anything we receive from an unknown source. For all we know, this could be a deliberate attempt to distract or mislead our investigators.”
“All right, all right. Enough with the prelude,” the president ordered. “Let’s hear it. Please.”
The director nodded to Lindley, who set a briefcase on the table. He opened it and took out two sealed plastic evidence bags.
As soon as Mrs. Coyle saw the little black lacquered case in the first envelope, her hand flew up to take it from Lindley.
“That’s Zoe’s!” she said. “She bought it in Beijing this summer.”
In the other bag was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet of paper. It was laid out flat now, but several creases showed where it had been folded.
“These came into a suburban Washington field office by regular mail this morning,” Burns said. “I can tell you that Zoe’s fingerprints are the only ones on that black case.”
Mrs. Coyle stared at the little box, running her finger slowly across its contours through the plastic. It was heartbreaking to watch.
“This note was folded up inside,” Burns pressed on. “It’s totally clean of prints as well. We’ve already taken a sample of the ink. We could get something there. I want to assure you we’re putting every resource onto this.”
“What do they want, Ron?”
Unlike his wife, the president was stone-faced. During the campaign, he’d been equally praised and criticized for his stoicism — or robotic quality, depending on whose story you were reading. He had been a law professor at one time and it showed. Burns admired the man’s strength, in any case. He knew he couldn’t have held up nearly as well under similar circumstances. His two daughters, and his wife, were his life, at least his life away from work.
“This is going to come as a shock,” he told the First Couple. “But again, let me stress that we can’t assume anything about this, true or false.”
Even now, Burns realized, he was stalling the president of the United States. Finally, there was nothing left to do but lay the note flat on the table in front of them. It was only a few sentences, and they were brutally succinct.
“There is no ransom. There will be no demands. The price, Mr. President, is knowing that you will never see your children again.”
HALA AL DOSSARI POPPED OPEN her eyes and looked with alarm around the room. For the fourth straight morning, it took a moment, maybe five seconds, to remember exactly where she was.
Wayfarer Hotel.
Washington.
America.
It was strange, waking to silence, in such an uncomfortable, foreign environment. At home, they woke to the adhan every morning, ringing out from two dozen mosques in the neighborhood. Back in their coral house. With their two beloved children.
That all seemed like somebody else’s life now — finishing up her residency, worrying about what to make for dinner, eating alone with Fahd and Aamina most nights while Tariq worked late at his accounting firm.
That was before he started coming home from the mosque talking about American devils, and the inevitable war — any number of things Hala knew in her heart to be true. He rambled nightly about how the United States was a cancer, one that would spread and infect the entire globe if it was left unchecked.
And now here they were. The Wayfarer Hotel. Washington. The previous night she had nearly killed a man on the street. A petty thief.
The clock on the nightstand said four fifty. Hala slipped out from under the cheap hotel comforter and took the television remote to the foot of the bed. She sat there in her nightgown, flipping channels with the sound off so as not to wake Tariq.
It was the same story everywhere — CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. The Coyle kidnapping had become a national obsession, while the suicides at Dulles had already disappeared into the background. It seemed so incredibly apt to her. Systematic. What were two dead Arabs worth here, as compared to two white, wealthy American children? Everything had a price in this country. Everything. And these self-obsessed fools wondered why the rest of the world hated them?
As to whether any of these recent events had something to do with the lack of communication from The Family since they’d arrived, Hala could only guess. It had been four days of convenience store food and lying low in this dank hotel room, this cave, waiting for word that she’d begun to suspect might not be coming.
“Hala?” Behind her on the bed, Tariq stirred. “Ha-laa. Turn it off. It only upsets you.”
“It’s always the same,” she said. “Every single channel. The same babble, the same video.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why you should turn it off. Leave it off, my darling.”
She reached up to do it, but then stopped short when the light from the screen caught something on the floor. It was a glossy piece of paper, or a brochure of some kind.
Someone had slipped a note under the door in the night.
Even before she knew what it was, Hala’s pulse began to race faster.
“What is it?” Tariq asked. “When did it come? Who delivered it?”
“It’s from the Smithsonian,” she said, bringing it for a better look under the bedside lamp. “The Museum of Natural History. I’m sure it wasn’t there before.”
They unfolded it on the bed.
Inside, the brochure showed a map of the museum’s galleries and current exhibits, but it was nothing more than any ordinary tourist might pick up. There were no instructions or additional markings of any kind. And yet, wasn’t that exactly what she and Tariq were meant to be here — just any tourists?
“It says they open at ten,” she read off the page.
For Hala, the implication was clear. First contact had finally been made.