FEDERAL PLAZA
NEW YORK CITY
Monday morning
The young man’s fingerprints identified him as Mifsud Shadid, age twenty, younger than any of the terrorists at the Lake Pleasant cabin. He sat in an uncomfortable chair on one side of the table in a small white-walled windowless interview room. He was sitting very still, trying to look arrogant and unconcerned, but too young and too scared to pull it off. He kept rubbing at the sling on his arm. He didn’t look to be in any pain. His lips were moving in repetitive Arabic phrases, probably repeating a prayer over and over.
Sherlock, Kelly, and Cal, along with a half-dozen other agents, stood in the next room, watching Shadid closely through the one-way glass. All of them knew he was their last hope to get any useful information. They’d spoken to the teenage girl who’d blown up the house in Brooklyn the night before, Kenza the name on her passport. They’d found her lying in her hospital bed under guard, her right arm elevated and her wrist wired, her arm swathed in bandages to her elbow. Without the cap she’d worn the previous night, her short dark hair stood in spikes around her face. She looked like a young East Ender. How strange someone so young had already been twisted into a terrorist. They’d hoped they could use her pain, or the drugs they’d given her. They’d tried shaming her, threatening her, lying about Mifsud, the young man they were looking at through the glass, but she’d stared out at them through large dark eyes, eyes that had seen too much in her seventeen years, and looked contemptuous. It was only when they told her Shadid had given up the Strategist that she’d said anything at all. “You’re a lying bitch,” she’d said to Kelly in a clipped British accent, and then she’d closed her eyes and turned away on the pillow.
“Zachery said to give Shadid a little more time to think about his sins,” Kelly said to the other agents. “He’ll be coming in soon, to observe.” She waved a hand toward the muted flat-screen TV on the wall behind them that was tuned to an Al Jazeera newscast. “Isn’t it amazing that Al Jazeera already knows our three terrorists are British citizens? According to that pretty young Arabic woman in her bright red Western suit, the American FBI brutally attacked three Arabs, killed one and injured the other two. Yet another racially motivated violent act is perpetrated by American law enforcement. Someone had to have leaked it last night. It was a zoo.” She shook it off. “Okay, so how do we approach Shadid?”
Cal said, “Shadid’s very young. He’s never been arrested, certainly not for a terrorist act and not in the United States. We don’t need him to talk about last night, we’ve got him cold on that.” He grinned, said in a proper Oxford English accent, “Why don’t I play the part of a British lawyer, sent from the British consulate to defend one of Her Majesty’s put-upon citizens from the big, bad American FBI? I can at least try to keep him talking longer than he would otherwise.”
She stared. “That’s impressive, Agent McLain. Are you part British, like Agent Drummond here in our New York office?”
“Nope, pure mongrel American. I did some acting way back and my dad’s an incredible mimic. I inherited his talent . . . well, some of it. You should hear him sing Elton John.”
Kelly said thoughtfully, “Nothing he says would be admissible, but who cares? If you think you can pull it off, it can’t make him trust us any less than he already does. I doubt he saw you at the house, Cal, not well, anyway. Let’s try it. Sherlock, you up for being überbitch?”
“I’m up for anything now that I’ve had a shower and cleaned up. First, though, we need to get Cal dressed up a little, find him a fresh dress shirt and tie, and a briefcase, if he’s going to be coming straight from the British consulate.”
Ten minutes later, Kelly looked Cal up and down in his borrowed shirt, and Zachery’s leather briefcase. “The shirt’s a little tight, Cal, but it’ll do. Keep on the suit coat to cover it. Here, let me straighten the tie.” When she stepped back, she nodded. “You’ll do.”
The three of them walked into the interview room together. Kelly sat down, crossed her arms over her chest, and introduced herself and Sherlock. Then she eyed Cal and dropped all warmth. “Mr. Shadid, this is your counsel, sent by the British consulate, Mr. Jonathan Clark-Wittier.”
Good name, Cal thought. Where did she come up with that? “Mr. Shadid,” he said, and nodded to the young man.
Kelly looked at the young man staring back at her, trying too hard to look uninterested. She turned to Sherlock. “Mr. Shadid and his imported fellow assassins tried to murder you last night, so why don’t you speak to him first?”
“A moment, Special Agent Giusti,” Cal said. “I would like to speak to this British citizen privately before you begin questioning him.”
Kelly, not looking away from Shadid, said, “You can forget that, Counselor. The man tried to kill federal officers, here on American soil. You’re here only as a courtesy.”
Sherlock was aware Mifsud Shadid was staring at her, hate beaming out of dark eyes, for her specifically and for her as simply one of the enemy. She sat back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and pulled a full-bodied sneer out of her bag. “Mr. Shadid, how old are you? Fourteen? Fifteen? Is that your sister in the hospital with a shattered wrist?”
“I am twenty-one years old, not fifteen!”
“No, you’re not, you turned twenty a month ago.”
“She is not my sister!”
Interesting, Kelly thought. His eyes fell to his hands, clasped in front of him on the scarred table, to the shackles encircling his wrists.
Sherlock shook her head, marveled aloud, “And you consider yourself a fighter? A professional? I don’t think so. I’ve got to say, though, that young girl you brought with you to set the bomb in the house? To burn all of us alive? She was the only one of you who showed some grit and courage. Is that how a fighter behaves, cowering in the bushes after sending a little girl to her almost certain death?”
She lunged forward, banged her fist on the table, making him jump. His eyes flew to her face. “You expected to kill me? You couldn’t kill this stuffed-shirt lawyer the British consulate sent to defend your wretched hide, not even if I handed you my gun.”
Young Mifsud Shadid yelled, “I will kill you myself, you whore! You are an enemy of Islam, a blight to be erased and forgotten, cursed in life and in death.”
What a lovely British accent, Kelly thought. It sounded to her trained ear straight out of Manchester.
“Yeah, yeah, quite your party line,” Sherlock said, and looked like she wanted to yawn. Then her face hardened. “Mr. Shadid, why did you bring along your sister to do the dirty work for you?”
“I told you, Kenza is not my sister!”
“That is enough, Agent,” Cal said. “You are bludgeoning this young man with accusations, insulting him—”
“We are not in a court of law, Mr. Clark-Wittier,” she snapped out at him, without giving him the courtesy of a look back.
Mifsud said, “Kenza is well trained, and her heart is with us. Not even you saw her slip into that house. You should not have heard her slip out. She would have succeeded if you hadn’t been waiting for us with those floodlights and so many guns.”
Sherlock was shaking her head. “And you can’t imagine why we were armed and ready for you? Did you believe us fools? Or didn’t you question it at all? Did you believe the Strategist and the imam are very sophisticated, that they know what they were doing? I mean, they did manage to blow up that high-speed train in France, did they not? But then look what the Strategist did—he sent only the three of you to attack me, a well-guarded FBI agent; I don’t think that shows much talent at all.
“The old man who died last night, Mohammad Hosni, was he your handler, your boss, your grandfather?” She paused for an instant, but got no reaction from Shadid.
“You spoke of Kenza being so quiet. Well, she wasn’t, because I heard her. I’ll tell you, Mifsud, I still can’t believe you had to rely on a little girl to plant the bomb so that you and grandpa could shoot us dead if we managed to come running out of the burning house.” She gave him a contemptuous look. “Impressed by the imam and the Strategist? I don’t think so, look at the three pitiful tools he sent.”