“This is my case. I know it inside and out. Janice and I put it together, with Kathleen’s and Karin’s help, of course.”
Karin had performed a lot of the grunt work, had actually seemed enthused about it, absorbing every detail of the case, almost to the point of obsession. His supervisor, Assistant District Attorney Kathleen Haggerty, had contributed little, but had a brilliant mind. Doug had no doubt that she could pick up on all the nuances of the case in a matter of hours and prosecute it just fine. But he was damned if he’d let it go without a fight. He’d done the work, put in the long hours. He and Janice, really.
Pratt shrugged. “Yes, it’s your case. But we can’t afford to let this one slip through our fingers. If you want to stay on, that’s okay by me, but I need your total focus on the case, Doug. And if it were me, I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else but my kid.”
Through clenched teeth, Doug said, “I can handle it.” He needed this case. He needed something to keep him busy, or thoughts of what might be happening to Preston and Sally’s anguished, accusing looks would surely drive him insane. He’d already entertained thoughts of buying a gun, looking for the kidnappers himself. If he didn’t have something else to do….
Pratt gazed at him absently for a moment. “You understand what’s on the line here? We can’t afford to fuck this up. You slip up once, and you’re benched. Can you handle that?”
Doug nodded. “That’s fair. But I won’t screw up. You’ll see.”
Pratt gave a final nod of his head, rapped the doorframe with a knuckle for emphasis, and disappeared down the hall.
Doug sighed and turned his attention back to the work in front of him, but he’d read only a paragraph or so when he heard another knock at the door. Karin McNichols stood on the threshold, files in hand. Her face was drawn, complexion pale and wan.
“I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” He waited, then dropped his gaze, hoping she’d take the hint.
“Is this a bad time?” she said.
He lifted his head.
She hadn’t moved. “We scheduled some time to review bullet points for your opening argument.”
Doug frowned. It wasn’t like him to forget an appointment. Maybe Pratt was right.
“I could come back later,” McNichols said.
“No, it’s fine. Sorry, I spaced. Come in.”
Tentative at first, she stepped inside the door, then took a seat and opened a file. Doug closed his and shut his eyes, clearing his head of what he’d been working on. For the next half-hour, they went over the details of the case, outlining the points they wanted to make in the opening argument of the Masoud trial. Satisfied that the bullet points flowed the way he wanted to present the case, Doug sat back.
“Nice work,” he said. “Where are we on witness prep?”
“I’ve met with almost everyone on the list that you said you didn’t need to meet.”
“Can you get them all in? Once the trial starts, we won’t have a lot of time to do this.”
“I know. I’ve got it covered.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
She gathered up her papers. “I’ll have Connie type up the bullet points and the outline so you can rehearse.”
“Terrific. Let’s set aside some time tomorrow to do that.”
“I’ll get it on your calendar.” She stood, but hesitated. “Any word on transportation?”
He glanced up at her. “No. Why?”
She shrugged. “I’d be worried, that’s all. I’d want to know how the marshals are going to get him into that courtroom on time and without incident.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll find out when they tell us.”
She nodded and turned for the door.
Doug had barely opened the file he’d been working on before Karin showed up when he felt a presence in his doorway again. Thinking Karin must have forgotten something, he felt his impatience grow.
“What now?” He sighed as he lifted his gaze. His face flushed as soon as he saw not Karin but Special Agent Jenny Roberts standing there.
“Sorry about what happened to your son,” she said. “I spoke with Jensen; I know the agents working the case will do everything they can to get him back.”
“Have you heard anything? Have they made any progress at all?”
“I wish I knew. I came by to ask you a few more questions about your father.”
“Thanks, but I have to prep for trial.”
“The sooner you cooperate, Mr. Keator, the sooner we’re out of your hair.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“We both know that’s not true.” She took two steps inside his office. “Five minutes.”
He sighed again and nodded toward a chair.
She eased into it, perching on the edge. “Tell you what. I’ll start. Here’s what we’ve got. Looks like your father stole a car from the garage where he works and took off running south. An Ohio trooper pulled him over. He backed up and rammed the cruiser, knocked the trooper unconscious, and used the cop’s gun to shoot out the communications gear in the cruiser. Right now he’s still in the wind, but none of this helps him any. He’s dug the hole he’s in way deeper.”
Doug stared at her, aghast, unable to comprehend what she was telling him. He tried to find words, to say something in defense of his father, but nothing came out. How could he defend a man he barely knew? They’d held each other at arms’ length for so long, he had a hard time picturing Zane from any other angle.
“That sound like something your father would do?” Doug had no answer. “My boss thinks maybe your dad took the boy as a hostage.”
“That’s crazy. What for? Why would he need a hostage?”
“You tell me. What’s he running from?”
Doug was about to tell her that his dad hadn’t run from anything in his life. But he had. He’d run from a family, a wife and two kids. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but there it was. He shoved the feelings to one side, and put his lawyer’s hat back on. Other than that single act of cowardice, if that’s what it had been—maybe it was time he asked—Doug had never known his father to back down from anything.
“He said you raided his home with no warning or identification,” he said in a quiet voice.
“You spoke with him?”
“He called me, yes,” Doug said with a nod. “I think he’s running from you.”
“Where was he?”
“I have no idea.”
“Assuming he’s the man who shot up a state trooper’s car this morning, he’s headed south. Any guesses as to where he’s headed?”
Doug shook his head. The only family he knew of were an aunt and uncle whom he’d never known, much older than his father. He thought they both lived on the west coast. And Rachel, Doug’s sister, of course. But she lived east. And Doug didn’t think she’d spoken to their father in years, either. Mostly because of her jerk of a husband, Jack.
“No clue,” he said eventually. “So, did you? Raid his house?”
“Yes, we did.” She pinked for some reason. Embarrassment?
“Why? What the hell did he do?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“We’re on the same side, damn it.” He wanted to throttle her. God, how he hated these silos they all put up. He was as guilty of it as she. He couldn’t begin to count the times he’d had to take the same stance. He understood the need for confidentiality, but this wasn’t the time.
She changed the subject abruptly. “Your father ever been to Mexico?”
The question threw him off, and he wondered if she’d asked for that reason, to keep him off guard and guessing.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. Just following up on some loose ends.”
Doug peered at her sharply, but she didn’t wilt or volunteer anything more.
“Look, I know this is a lot. I can’t imagine how worried you mus
t be about your son.” She dropped her gaze to the hands in her lap. When she raised her eyes, Doug steeled himself for whatever was coming. “Don’t you think it’s a little too much?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe bad things do come in threes, but if it were me, I’d wonder if these two situations had something to do with each other.”
“No.” Doug shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s what’s killing me.” He heard his voice going ragged and stopped.
“I have an idea of how you feel, and I’m sorry,” Roberts said.
Doug took a couple of breaths, nodded his thanks. “Look, we’ve been through this. I don’t know my father very well, but one thing I do know is that he loves Preston. He wouldn’t do anything to mess him up. I think he feels guilty enough about not being there for my sister and me. Besides, the timing’s off. Didn’t you say he’s somewhere in Ohio?”
“He could have had an accomplice.” When Doug didn’t bite, she sighed. “Anyway, these two incidents can’t be coincidental, can they?”
“You tell me,” Doug said, anger and fear welling up in his chest. “You’re the ones who went after my father. My son had nothing to do with that.”
“Look, if this kidnapping isn’t related to a family member—your father’s the obvious choice—then it has to be a case you worked. So, give us something we can sink our teeth into. Give us something to investigate.”
“You can rule out family. That leaves cases.” He gestured at the files strewn across his desk. “Which one do you want? Take your pick. There are probably another dozen or so that I’ve closed that might fit the profile, too. You want to investigate? Go ahead. See how many of the assholes that I’ve put in jail are back out on the street.” He threw up his hands in frustration. “I imagine most of them would love payback. Wouldn’t you?”
“So, you’ll make case files available to us so we can go through them?”
“Fine by me, but you’ll have to take it up with my boss. And her boss, in a number of cases. They say it’s okay, have at ’em.”
“We will,” Roberts said, her composure still not reflecting the exasperation she must have felt.
“If I knew who took my son,” Doug said, “I’d give you his name on a silver platter. But I’m sure it’s not my dad. And I’m pretty sure he’s running for a good reason. Like, he thinks you’re going to kill him. He hasn’t been too keen on the federal government since he got out of Vietnam. He thinks Uncle Sam betrayed him and the men who served. He’s probably right. They lied to him and all the others who fought over there. I’d be a little paranoid of your intentions, too, if I were him, even if you showed some ID.”
She sat tight-lipped through his harangue. “Finished? Good. Maybe we can get to work.”
“You do that.”
40
The call from Zane had disturbed her, in more ways than one. Janice had grown to like the man, as gruff as he was. Liked him enough, in fact, that she’d harbored some romantic notions about the two of them. After all, she wasn’t getting any younger, and with retirement looming in a few years, she didn’t have a lot to look forward to. She’d put her heart and soul into her job, had worked nights and weekends not only to get ahead but learn how to do her job better than anyone she knew. She had, in essence, made herself invaluable, an expert at what she did. But the price had been a solitary home life.
With the years creeping up on her, she realized that she didn’t want to spend her retirement years alone. She wanted to share them, share herself, with a man she hoped she not only liked but could learn to love. Perhaps foolishly, she’d allowed herself the giddy feelings of a schoolgirl crush, something she hadn’t experienced since junior high. Zane either hadn’t read her signals or didn’t want to get involved, and she’d begun to think that maybe an almost sixty-year-old woman should leave well enough alone. She’d chided herself for acting childishly, and had been content to simply remain friends. That Zane now was on the run from the FBI suggested she hadn’t known him very well at all, or hadn’t judged his character well, both of which she found disturbing.
Even more disconcerting, Zane had said that his house had been raided that morning by the FBI. If that was true, she should have known about it. There was little that escaped her intelligence network, and she certainly kept tabs on the local FBI office, if only to coordinate the many ongoing cases both offices shared. That sent up a red flag in her mind. And Janice hadn’t recognized the special agent that had been in earlier to question Douglas. Which meant she must be from another office, since Janice made a point of remembering the names of every agent and staff member in the Detroit Division.
In addition to the field agents and intelligence specialists she’d known for decades, she’d befriended a whole new generation of wet-behind-the-ears recruits. There was the darling young man—Robbie—in IT who’d written a special SQL program to help her manage and access a database she’d assembled through years of analysis on the job. He’d been so grateful for the batch of cookies she’d baked.
But Janice’s special gift was her intuitive sense of how to frame data searches and see the connections among the results that came back. The events of the past few hours, along with the oddities that had caught her attention for several weeks, filled her with the sense that something was coming to a head. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there’d been too much chatter from too many quarters, as if something or someone had tickled the neurons of part of the Internet, firing up a successive string of impulses. It was kind of like a meme, rumor, video or news story that suddenly caught fire on social media. Only Janice hadn’t yet figured out the subject of the buzz. Attacks? Perhaps. But something else, too…
Right now, events circled Douglas like planets, and she wondered how his gravitational pull had suddenly become massive enough to bring them into orbit. He’d asked earlier if she thought the buzz she’d been hearing could be Masoud organizing terrorist acts in other cities. But everything they’d learned in building a case against Masoud suggested that he wasn’t capable of anything like that. What they’d learned, in fact, was that even the crime that Masoud was being tried for likely had been plotted and organized by someone else. Masoud had simply been following orders. They didn’t know whose.
Janice had been passing by Doug’s office, though, when the special agent had asked him whether Zane had been to Mexico recently. And that gave her one more bit of information to put into the search parameters. Her fingers rhythmically tapped out search terms, slowing until she ran out of ideas. She tapped the enter key, initiating the nifty little program Robbie had given her. Knowing it might take a few minutes for the program to search all the databases she’d plugged into it, she picked up her phone and called one of her counterparts in the FBI office down the street.
“Carol, it’s Janice,” she said when the analyst answered. “Say, I had a question about one of the entries on the visitor log for Masoud.”
“Oh, sure. What do you need?”
Janice made up a story about forgetting to write something down. After Carol provided her with the information she already had in her meticulous notes, Janice casually changed the subject.
“You folks must be having some real excitement over there.”
“Oh, you mean the fly team?” Carol said.
“Fly team!” Janice sounded impressed. “I noticed an SA in the office I didn’t recognize, but I had no idea she was on a fly team. What on earth is going on over there?”
“That must have been Roberts,” Carol said. She lowered her voice. “Apparently, they came in hot on the trail of someone high up on the ‘Most Wanted’ list.”
“Nothing to do with our case, does it?” Janice didn’t feign her concern.
“Masoud? I don’t think so. Anyway, the raid they conducted this morning was a bust.” Carol spoke so softly Janice strained to hear her. “Just between you and me, there’s nothing worse than a covert action gone bad. The cocky-jockey is cranky, Scanlon is cranky, and it
’s putting everyone in a bad mood.”
Janice offered up a snort of amusement at Carol’s euphemism for the team leader. “Better you than me. We have our own problems over here.”
“I heard,” Carol said breathlessly. “An AUSA’s son kidnapped? Terrible thing.”
“Word travels fast.”
“We’re in intelligence, dear.”
Janice thanked her for the help and ended the call. When she turned back to her computer, results had popped up on screen, pulled from scans of the Web, Nexis, and a variety of government databases, some of which she technically didn’t have access to. She skimmed the snippets of information rapidly, absorbing them, letting her subconscious work on making connections. Four Zane Keators in U.S…. Terrorist threat level raised to orange... Dodgers Stadium named as possible terrorist target… Mall of America adds extra security details for holiday weekend…
Extra precautions at large venues weren’t uncommon. Nor was it unusual for Homeland Security to raise the threat level. But Janice couldn’t shake the feeling that all the noise added up to something different this time. Suddenly, it rolled in and out of her vision. She scrolled back up to find what had caught her eye. A CBP log notation that Zane Keator had crossed from Mexico into Arizona two days earlier. She frowned, and typed furiously, putting in a search request for a passport photo to match the log. It would take a while, she knew. In the meantime, she continued skimming the pages of results. Nearly buried several pages later was another note on the CBP log entry. She reviewed it more carefully. Not a note, but a request, like hers, for more information on the log entry including a photo. Issued by someone at Langley.
She pushed away from the desk and stared at the wall, thoughts racing through her head. Zane had said he thought the FBI had raided his home. An FBI fly team was in town on a manhunt. CBP showed Zane Keator crossing the border from Mexico. If it wasn’t the Zane she knew, who was it?
She scooted up to the desk and worked her keyboard, starting a new search to cross-reference people on both the FBI’s and CIA’s wanted lists. She knew most of those on the FBI’s list, but wasn’t that familiar with who the CIA wanted overseas. A couple of names appeared on both lists, but her gaze zeroed in on one in particular—Zayn al-Qadir. She knew the name, of course. Allegedly responsible for dozens of bombings and terrorist attacks over the years, including the U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998. Never been photographed or positively identified. A ghost. Some even said he wasn’t real but an al-Qaeda creation, a fictitious character designed to strike fear in the West.
Stolen Identity Page 17
