Andrew Britton - The American

“You don’t make my job any easier, Ryan.” It was the last jab, and right that it should belong to the deputy director. “Undoubtedly, you’re wondering why word of your late-night visit hasn’t reached the front page of the Washington Post.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“We cut a deal with Elgin. Full immunity, straight from the top.”

Ryan flared, but Harper’s hand was up to stop him. “You don’t get a say in it, because it was your doing. The A.G. sent the offer directly to Elgin, because the attorney… You’ve met her?” A brief, angry shake of the head. “Well, the attorney is a high flier. She would have taken the publicity of a scandal over a deal for her client, but Elgin, dumb as he is, knew better. He said he would fire her if she broke the terms, and that would have looked worse for Harris than having her client walk away free and clear.

“In other words, Ryan, we got pretty damn lucky. Harris was the easy part — we’re still trying to convince the watch commander that it would be better for all concerned if he just dropped the matter. He doesn’t want the publicity either, so that might help us out a little bit. Only — and I want you to pay special attention to this,” he said, jamming his index finger into the top of his desk to make the point clear — “only because we had something on Elgin are you still sitting across from me. Without that card to play, you would have been done, without question. You’re making it hard, if not impossible, for me to watch your back. You have a name, fair enough. The name is different from the passport used in Valencia. Once again, fair enough. But you had better hope that this information turns out to be golden.

“Believe me,” Harper said with a scowl, “nothing should be more important to you right now, my friend.”

Naomi Kharmai leaned against the back of the third black Suburban, shivering hard despite the pale sun overhead and the thick woolen peacoat that was pulled tight around her. She was extremely pissed off, a fact that had been made abundantly clear to the SAC in the staging area. She had asked Harper if it could be kept in the Agency, had almost resorted to begging him, but he had mumbled something about “pressure for cooperation,” and now she was essentially out of the loop. Despite being one of the first people on the scene, she had been told, in no uncertain terms, that she was now included only as a professional courtesy.

She listened to the banal conversations of the agents around her and the clatter of automatic weapons as the HRT operators pulled gear out of their trucks and shrugged into heavy bulletproof vests.

She was startled by the loud roar of a motorcycle racing down the road next to the parking lot. Turning toward the sound, she was almost blinded by the light reflecting from the bike’s chrome pipes and bright blue paintwork. Squinting into the scene, she jumped again when a hand clamped down on her shoulder.

“Should be less than twenty minutes,” the man said.

She turned to face Bill Green, the Washington field office replacement for Luke Hendricks. “What, exactly, are you waiting on?”

“Search warrant to come through,” he replied. “I just got off the phone with one of my people at the courthouse. Evidently, the judge wasn’t too happy about how you dug up the information. She had a long talk with Alex Harris, and that helped out a little bit-”

“You think she’s dragging it out on purpose?”

“That would be my guess. We don’t really have a choice either way, so we wait here until we get the word.”

“Hey, boss.” They both turned as another agent approached. It was one of Green’s fawning aides, a tall, well-dressed prep-school type. He handed the SAC a thin manila folder. “This just came back from the courthouse.”

Naomi waited impatiently as Green perused the contents. “Well?”

He glanced up and flashed her a smile full of straight white teeth. “It’s a go.” Before she could respond, he was running toward the lead vehicle, shouting orders at the HRT commander, and then back at her over his shoulder: “Pick out a vehicle. You can wait on the sideline, Kharmai, but the teams are full. You stay off the field, understood?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. She glared at his back as he climbed into the passenger seat of the first vehicle, which pulled fast out of the parking lot.

She found what passed for room in the last vehicle, smashed in between two sweaty operators and their piles of gear. The Suburban swung from 7th onto D Street, racing east as the retractable stock of an MP-5A3 banged painfully into her knee for the third time. She gritted her teeth and, as she had done so many times in the past few weeks, silently cursed Ryan Kealey for putting her into this situation.

The apartment building on D Street was less than impressive. The outside looked respectable enough, with a four-story brick facade and worn stone steps leading up to a solid door of weathered oak. As soon as she stepped inside, however, the smell hit her like a slap to the face. The stench was a putrid combination of various cooking smells, which wafted up from beneath closed doors and permeated the filthy walls, and the lingering scent of spilled beer and what might have been the contents of a baby’s diaper. She almost retched until she started breathing through her mouth, and then saw that the others were doing the same thing.

Above it all, the piercing cries of a child and screamed obscenities from a Korean couple at the top of the stairwell.

Naomi lingered behind as Green and the HRT operators moved rapidly up the first flight of stairs. She had been given a flat 9mm pistol, which hung loose from her hip.

“How are they going in?” she asked Green when she finally caught up with him.

“It depends on what they hear. If there’s activity inside, then it’s entry rounds. If it’s quiet, they’ll go with the ram.” She nodded and started forward, but he reached out to grab her arm. “Hold on, let them get into position.”

The SAC listened to something over his earpiece, then turned back toward Naomi. “Okay, we’re moving up. Stay behind me.”

Inside the cramped apartment on the fifth floor, Abdullah Aziz al-Maroub watched intently as the last two agents went up the stairs. If it had to happen on his shift, he was glad it happened early, before the monotony of the work set in. In another hour, his back would have been sore and his eyelids heavy. He might well have missed them altogether.

He thought about how remarkably easy it had been to satisfy the apartment manager in the spring of 1998, when their predecessors had first set up in the city. It had taken nothing more than a few crumpled twenty-dollar bills to gain her permission, and the camera had gone up that same day. Positioned just above the transom inside the doorway, it gave him a clear shot of everyone leaving and entering the building. There was no sound; a video cable alone provided the images on the 20" screen in front of him, but he knew who these people were, and he knew why they were here.

As he called out for Darabi, his eyes never left the monitor.

Arriving on the fifth floor, Naomi saw that the operators were already in their preassigned positions. She held back with Green, her heart pounding in her ears.

One of the men extracted a fiber-optic snake from his pack. Holding the miniature video monitor in his left hand, he kneeled and slid the unit’s tiny

camera under the cheap wooden door of Apartment 5A.

Vanderveen was on 12th Street heading south when his cell phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He pulled the motorcycle over to the side of the road and answered immediately. Only one person had this number, and she had been instructed not to call except in case of an emergency. “Yes?”