Jihad db-5

by Stephen Coonts

  “Kenan’s dead?”

  “No. At least I hope not,” said Dean. Something in his voice must have tipped the clerk off — Dean had never been a very good liar — and the boy immediately stiffened, suspicious.

  “We think he may have been targeted by the person who murdered this man.” Dean gave him a picture of Asad, dead in the room, lying in a pool of blood.

  “God,” said the clerk, his resistance gone.

  “When did you last see Kenan?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Dean pulled out the print of the surveillance photo from the store where the kid worked, which had a time stamp on the bottom from that afternoon.

  “Did you see him after this?” he said, trying to sound as diplomatic as he could.

  “Jesus.”

  “You’re not in any trouble, Martin. I just want to prevent another murder if I can. How do you know Louis?”

  “Louis? This is Kenan Conkel.”

  “Kenan. Yeah, I’m sorry, that’s what I meant. It’s been a long night. You know him well?”

  “We were freshman.”

  “At Upper Michigan?”

  “No. Wayne State. I didn’t know he went to Upper Michigan.”

  “You went to Wayne State with him,” said Dean, realizing why they hadn’t found Kenan. “When was this?”

  “Three years ago, when I was a freshman.”

  “Kenan Conkel, Wayne State.”

  “Working on it,” said Rockman in his head.

  CHAPTER 98

  Though he rose just before dawn, Marid Dabir felt as if he’d overslept. He said his prayers, then went to find some place to eat and consider his next move.

  The small hotel had three dozen rooms, arranged in two stories around a parking lot. The steps down from the second story went through a small building next to the entrance to the lot. As Dabir passed through, he noticed the night clerk sleeping on a couch behind the reservation desk.

  Dabir walked over to him, looking to see if he’d left his wallet anywhere nearby — the man’s credit card number would be handy for making a plane reservation. But Dabir didn’t see it and decided it wasn’t worth trying to sneak it from his pocket.

  His search had disturbed the mouse for the hotel computer, waking the unit from sleep mode. The program for handling reservations flashed on the screen; as Dabir looked at it, he wondered if he might be able to get a credit card number from that. Backing through the records could be done easily with the mouse, and within seconds Dabir had not one but three different credit card accounts with their owners’ information, including the supposedly secret printed IDs on the cards.

  There was a bagel shop across the street from the hotel, but the idea of having breakfast with Jews nauseated him. Dabir walked two blocks until he found a silver-walled diner. On the way in he picked up a copy of the local paper, having learned from experience that even the nosiest American tended to leave a reader in peace.

  He was halfway through his tea and toast when he found the story about the murder of an unknown man in a city suburb. Barely six paragraphs long, the story said that the man seemed to have been killed by three gunmen, who were then caught in a shootout with police who responded to a 911 call.

  Unsure how much if any of the story was true, Dabir turned the page.

  CHAPTER 99

  “This is all your fault,” Bing told Rubens. Her ears were tinged red and seemed to stick straight out from the sides of her head. “You bypassed all of the controls, all of the processes—”

  “I bypassed nothing,” said Rubens. He tried to continue toward the conference room, but Bing put out her hand, blocking his way.

  “You used a personal relationship with the president — you used George Hadash’s death to get around me.”

  “I did nothing of the kind,” said Rubens sharply.

  “If you had taken him when I suggested, he’d be alive and we’d know where the target was. You put your ego above what was best for the country.”

  Second-guessing was standard Washington procedure, and Rubens had fully expected it. The accusation that he had used Hadash’s death, however, angered him greatly. Rubens pressed his teeth together to keep from saying anything. His silence did the trick — the red tinge on Bing’s ears spread to the rest of her face, and she swirled around and headed down the hallway.

  “I see you’re warming up to Ms. Bing,” said Defense Secretary Blanders behind him.

  Rubens managed a wan smile before continuing to the briefing room. The head of the NSA, Admiral Devlin Brown, had arrived earlier and was sitting on the far side of the room. Bing was stooped down behind him, whispering something in his ear; she saw Rubens come in and rose abruptly, moving over toward her spot at the head of the four-sided table.

  Rubens pretended he hadn’t seen her and took his seat next to Brown. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the nearby carafe, even though he’d already had two that morning.

  “Anything new?” Brown asked.

  “We’ve identified the man who was with Asad and we’re looking for him. We’re looking for patterns in airplane flights and one of our people will be on the flight that we think Asad was to take from Detroit. Outside of that, we have nothing.”

  More precisely, they had quite a lot: intercepts of possible messages, money transactions, telephone conversations, a vast file of rumors and innuendo compiled by the different agencies now involved in trying to determine the plot’s target. What Rubens meant was, they had so much information that they had nothing.

  President Marcke burst into the room, moving as briskly as Rubens had ever seen him walk. At most sessions with his aides, the president assumed the role of a listener, waiting until all sides of the issue were raised. He’d sit back in his seat, often unconsciously twisting a paperclip, not quite Buddhalike, but generally impassive and as unemotional as a judge as his advisors debated an issue. It was only in one-on-one or very small meetings that he put the true Marcke on display, thumping his desk and occasionally jabbing his companion’s chest to make a point.

  But today was different. Today he spoke as soon as he came through the door, his voice sharp, as if he were a football coach at halftime with his team down by a touchdown.

  “Gentlemen, ladies. One thing I want to make clear from the start,” he said, walking to his usual spot at the table but not sitting down. “Some of you believe this crisis is a byproduct of my decision to allow Asad into the country rather than having him arrested in Turkey. I believe it was the best and most logical decision at the time. Some of you may disagree. Those disagreements are with me, and you may take them up at the proper time. That time is not now. Billy, what do you have for us?”

  Rubens, cheered by what he interpreted as a not-so-subtle slap at Bing, began his briefing.

  CHAPTER 100

  Even for a U.S. Marshal — or an ersatz one, such as Tommy Karr — carrying a pistol on an aircraft involved major bureaucratic hassle. Forms had to be filled out, identities checked, authorizations reviewed. Karr didn’t mind, however — someone had left two boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the security office where they parked him. He was just debating the relative merits of powdered versus granulated sugar coverings when the head of airport security arrived to take him to the plane.

  Carefully finessing the detector at the gate so he would appear to be just a regular passenger, Karr boarded with the first-class passengers, taking a seat not far from the pilot’s cabin. The passenger list had already been thoroughly vetted, but Asad’s organization had demonstrated that they were adept at operating under the radar, and Karr eyed each passenger carefully. The people boarding, carry-ons pushed against their knees to squeeze down the aisles, were mostly business types bound for the Gulf Coast area, where construction was booming more than a year after Hurricane Katrina had laid New Orleans low. Only two were of obvious Middle Eastern descent.

  “How you doing, Tommy?” asked Chafetz from the Art Room as the plane backed from the gate.

&
nbsp; “Fine.”

  “Lia’s going to meet you at the airport.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “The ten or fifteen minutes after takeoff is the most crucial. Statistically.”

  “I guess I better not take a nap then, huh?” Karr laughed.

  The man in the seat next to him had overheard him talking to himself and eyed Karr as if he were a nutcase. Karr gave him a bright “How ya doin’?” and pushed back in his seat, all smiles.

  As the plane taxied, a large black man walked up into first class from the rear cabin. He walked slowly, obviously looking for someone he thought was a passenger on the plane.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said a stewardess, chasing him from behind. “You have to remain seated until the plane is in the air.”

  The man ignored her. Karr watched as he went around the front of the first-class area, turning slowly and walking down the other aisle. The stewardess shook her head and repeated her admonitions without visible effect.

  “Sit down, bub,” said Karr’s neighbor. “Give the lady a break.”

  “Mind your business.”

  “I said sit down.”

  “Stuff it,” said the other man, disappearing into coach.

  “Nice, real nice,” said Karr’s neighbor, turning to him. “That’s supposed to pass for clever, right? You believe that?”

  “No manners. Young people,” added Karr’s neighbor — even though he and the person he was criticizing were both about thirty.

  Fifteen minutes after they’d taken off, the black man returned again, once more moving slowly and looking at passengers’ faces.

  “What are you, the grim reaper?” asked the man sitting next to Karr.

  “Just shut up.”

  “You’re telling me to shut up?”

  “You see any other jerk with a garage door for a mouth?”

  “Federal agent, buddy. Sit down,” said the man, rising. “FBI.”

  “Air marshal,” said the other man. “You sit down.”

  Karr buried his face in his hand, trying to keep his laughter to a level that wouldn’t cause the plane to shake. As he did, he noticed a passenger one row ahead shielding his face and making a very serious effort to count the clouds outside.

  * * *

  “He’s in seat 2B,” Karr told the Art Room from the restroom a few minutes later. “About five-eight, light-skinned black, close-cropped dark brown hair, maybe twenty-five. New suit jacket. Nice. No puckering at the shoulders. White T-shirt. Gold chain. Generic sneakers.”

  “Are the sneakers significant?” asked Chafetz.

  “They’re the whole thing,” said Karr. “They’re not Nike. Get it? See if he was a rap star or something like that, he’d pay attention to his footwear. Here—”

  “It’s kind of thin, Tommy.”

  “Maybe. But I say we check him out anyway.”

  CHAPTER 101

  Dean looked at the Conkel house while the marshals circled around the block, cutting off possible escape routes on the chance that Kenan Conkel had decided to hide out in his parents’ house. The raised ranch looked almost exactly like its neighbors, any eccentricities carefully hidden behind the dented aluminum siding. A basketball hoop hung down above the single-bay garage; the rim was bent slightly to one side, though not quite enough to prevent play. The grass had been mowed recently but the edges left untrimmed.

  “Units are in place,” said Chris Sabot, the marshal next to him in the car.

  Dean cracked open the car door and got out. They’d decided against asking the local police to come for backup. The Art Room thought it unlikely that Conkel was here, and they needed to walk a delicate line, gathering information without inadvertently giving any away. Besides, half a dozen police cars weren’t going to make Conkel or his parents any more likely to talk.

  Dean scanned the house and yard as he went up the driveway. His right hand stayed near his hip, ready to grab the Beretta from its holster beneath his jacket if necessary. He jogged up the three steps to the stoop and tapped the buzzer.

  The curtain behind the row of windows next to the door moved. A face appeared about chest high. Though beardless, it was so much like Kenan’s that Dean froze. Then he realized it was a girl’s.

  “Can I help you?” she asked through the glass.

  “I’m here from the U.S. Marshals Service,” Dean said. He held a business card to the window. “I’d like to talk to your parents.”

  The girl drew back. A minute later, a woman in her early forties answered the door. Short and slightly stocky, the woman wore thick glasses that emphasized the roundness of her face. She didn’t look like Kenan at all — except for the color of her hair, an almost foxlike shade of golden red.

  Dean introduced himself and gave her the card.

  “I’d like to come in. I have some questions about your son, Kenan. Is he here?”

  “Kenan? Is he in trouble?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Dean. “We’re afraid he may have witnessed a murder and gone into hiding. We’re worried about him.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, my God. Come in. Frank? Frank!”

  Dean nodded to Sabot, and they went inside the house. Sabot went downstairs to check the basement rooms; Dean followed Mrs. Conkel upstairs. The dining room, kitchen, and living room were clustered on his left. The rooms were small and a quick glance showed Kenan wasn’t there.

  Mrs. Conkel had gone down the hall to the right. There were two rooms on the right; a bathroom and another room lay on the left. Dean took a few steps down the hall, far enough to see into the first room on the right; there was a sewing machine set up in it, and an exercise bike.

  “My husband will be right out. He’s just taking a shower,” said Mrs. Conkel, emerging from the room at the end of the hall on the left. Dean guessed it was the master bedroom.

  “Your son isn’t here?” asked Dean.

  “No, he’s at school in Detroit.”

  “Have you spoken to him today?”

  “No.”

  “Recently?”

  “Well, no. Not very recently. He doesn’t talk much. You know at that age, they don’t.” She smiled awkwardly. “Would you like some coffee?”

  Mrs. Conkel started past him toward the kitchen. Dean took a step down the hall, glancing into the room on the left; it was the sister’s, and from the hall looked empty, though of course Kenan could be hiding in the closet. The master bedroom door was closed. Dean turned back and went into the kitchen, temporarily putting off a more thorough search.

  The family had only just finished breakfast; a bowl of cereal and a half-eaten piece of toast sat on the table. Dean looked at the glasses and counted three places.

  “How do you like your coffee?” asked Mrs. Conkel.

  “Black,” he told her.

  Sabot came up and stood in the doorway, shaking his head ever so slightly to indicate Kenan hadn’t been downstairs.

  “So, you haven’t heard from Kenan recently,” said Dean.

  “No.”

  “And that’s not unusual.”

  “Not with Kenan. God, I do wish he’d call more.” Her voice trembled slightly at the word “God.”

  Frank Conkel came into the kitchen wearing a blue work uniform. The logo on the pocket said he worked for Cole Heating & Cooling. He was taller than his son, with dark, ruddy cheeks that hung away from his face, but he had the same overall build, thin and narrow. His hair was still wet from the shower.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Dean.

  “I’m wondering when the last time was that you saw your son Kenan.”

  “Why?”

  “He may have seen a murder, Frank,” said his wife.

  “Detroit is a cesspool,” said Mr. Conkel. And with that he collapsed into a seat, as if the supports had been knocked out from under him.

  “We shouldn’t have let him go to school there.” Mrs. Conkel put the coffee down on the table. “We shouldn’t have.”

  “Is he here?” Dean asked Mr. Conkel
.

  “Here? Look around. Do you see him?” His voice was pained, not angry.

  “Have you checked his dorm?” asked Mrs. Conkel.

  “He doesn’t seem to be at school a whole lot,” Dean told her. “He hasn’t shown up for his classes all semester.”

  “What do you mean?” said Mr. Conkel.

  “Daddy, where did you park the car?” asked Kenan’s sister, coming down the hall. “It’s not in the driveway.”

  Mr. Conkel went down the steps to the front door, pushing open the screen and stepping onto the stoop in his socks. Mrs. Conkel followed. If they were acting, thought Dean, it was an Academy Award performance.

  * * *

  Kenan got to Indianapolis a little after nine A.M. and managed to find the airport without having to ask directions. Worried that his parents might report the car stolen, he decided it was better not to park it at the airport, since if it were found there it might help them trace him. So he got back on the highway and drove east a few miles. He found an apartment complex, left the car in an open slot marked “guests,” then trudged back in the direction he’d come. He was way ahead of schedule — the bus wasn’t supposed to arrive until three in the afternoon — but he kept as brisk a pace as he could, constantly shifting his small suitcase back and forth. The bag had only a pair of pants and a sweater in it, but grew heavier and heavier as he walked.

  There’d been nothing on the radio about the mosque or the sheik. The more time passed, the more it seemed as if it hadn’t really happened — as if all the police cars were just part of his imagination. Kenan almost believed that if he drove back to Detroit, he’d find the sheik waiting for him at the motel, probably concerned that he had missed praying with him before sunrise.

  A car buzzed by the shoulder of the highway, so close that the wind spun Kenan off his feet. Fear seized him; he did not want to die before he fulfilled his God-given mission. But it was hard to get up. He hadn’t eaten since last night, nor had he slept. Finally, he managed to push himself upright and, watching the traffic more closely, walked the rest of the way to the airport.