79

Dawn was slowly arriving, with the Norfolk Navy base security lights blinking out one by one from the illumination of the rising sun. The area around pier five was a nuthouse, with enough police cars spinning their lights to make someone think Charles Manson was on the loose.

I’d told my team to hang back in the shadows and let the FBI take the lead, and they were more than happy to do so. All of them were currently sitting in our rental car, the radio on some random pop station. I could see Jennifer and Knuckles slumped over, asleep. Carly was still awake, probably running our last action through her head over and over again.

I would love to have joined them, but I was waiting on Brock to finish whatever he was doing with the gaggle of vehicles from about fourteen different agencies. They were probably all arguing over who had jurisdiction.

Carly and I had returned to the dock, skipping right by the Sea-Doo and the body, and had then sat around waiting on an FBI explosive ordnance disposal team. In the meantime, Dingler had asked me to retrieve the body, and I’d said, “Not my job. I just kill them.”

As far as I was concerned, he could go get it himself. He did, dragging the body back with our Sea-Doo. We’d searched it, finding another passport and a cell phone. A waterlogged, worthless cell phone.

Eventually, EOD had arrived, and I’d hauled one of them back to the floating bomb. When we got there, he said, “I can’t work on it out over the water.”

“Okay. Get on it and drive it back.”

He looked at me like I was crazy, and I said, “It’s not going to go off. I chased that thing at full throttle, watching it bounce up and down.”

He stared at it for a moment, and I said, “Let me guess. You want me to drive it back, but only after you’re clear of the area.”

He shook his head and said, “No. It’s just that I’ve never driven one of those things.”

I said, “I’ll do it.”

“No, you won’t. I’m not letting anyone get near that thing but me. Show me how it works.”

That was more like what I thought he’d say. EOD guys weren’t in the business of being afraid of a bomb. I gave him a quick class, and off we went, puttering back to the boat ramp. By the time we got there, Brock was on station, asking me to come back to the Norfolk naval base. I got my rental keys from Dingler and tossed them to Carly, telling her to follow us because I had to do some gentle persuasion with Brock.

We started driving, and he said, “You pulled it off. That was some good shooting, and Dingler says you’re borderline psychotic for going after them with the last Jet Ski.”

I said, “No. Dingler’s borderline psychotic. And it was your sniper who took the shot.”

“What?”

“We were never here. You take the credit from the moment you ‘found’ the safe house until you stopped the attack.”

“No way. I’m not taking credit for something I didn’t do.”

“Yes, you are. We had nothing to do with this. Frame it however you want. Make it vague, I don’t care, like ‘elements of the FBI blah-blah-blah,’ or ‘a combined effort with multiple federal agencies discovered, blah-blah-blah,’ but under no circumstances will you mention the females or what Knuckles and I did.”

“The press is going to want to know. They’re going to start tearing this apart.”

“Come on. They’ll take whatever you give them, especially when you answer every damn question with, ‘I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.’”

He looked at me and said, “This isn’t right. I can’t take the accolades for something I didn’t do.”

“Unfortunately, it’s exactly right. Trust me.”

“Dingler refused to get on with you. Now I’m going to say he was the one who took out the Sea-Doo?”

I said, “I’m way ahead of you. I figured you’d need some proof, so I left his night vision goggles at the bottom of the river.”

“You did what?”

“Don’t you see? Of course he was there; how else would his NODs get there?”

“You dumped his NODs in the river? Do you have any idea how sensitive those things are? They’re a controlled item, for God’s sake.”

I looked shocked and said, “Me? Talk to your man. He’s the one who left them.”

He quit talking to me, spending the rest of the drive to the Navy base muttering to himself. When we arrived at the pier he saw the cluster of cars and must have immediately assumed someone was trying to take over, or maybe it was SOP for anyone in a three-letter agency to get sucked into a meeting to compare badges, because he took off running to the scrum. Either way, I’d been waiting ever since. I’d let the others try to catch some rack time but was afraid to do so myself. You never know what you’re going to miss by taking a nap.

I saw Knuckles sit up in the passenger seat and walked over to the car. Jennifer was asleep in the back, and I was glad to see that Carly had also finally closed her eyes.

Knuckles rolled down the window and pointed behind me, saying, “Looks like the meeting’s over.”

I turned around to see Brock headed my way. I said, “About time.”

Knuckles exited the vehicle, and Carly woke up. She followed, gently closing the door so as not to wake Jennifer. Brock reached us and said, “Okay, I think I’ve sold your plan. September eleventh is helping us out. The story is about the past and how we’ve gotten our act together for the future. Thank God we stopped it. They’re going to have a press conference in an hour. DHS will take the lead, then let the port authority speak, then me, then the sheriff’s department, and probably the Navy as well. DHS wanted to know what the hell happened, and I told them the basics of where the action had taken place but said I haven’t finished talking to my men. They bought it.”

I said, “I appreciate it. What did you come up with as far as further evidence? Any actionable intelligence?”

“Not really. The backpacks are just full of clothes and sundry items. We can use it to determine where they’ve been, but it’s no use for future actions. We found one cell phone on the guy you killed, but it was in his pocket, and it’s waterlogged. We have our tech guys working it, but that’ll take some time. The other cell phone is still in the woods somewhere, if that’s even what you saw him throw. We have the passport information, and we’re working that for cross-links.”

I pulled out the one we’d found on the guy with the truck and said, “Did you get this information?”

He said, “Yeah. Dingler passed it to me, but I could use the actual, if you don’t mind.”

Carly said, “Let me see that.”

I handed the passport to her and said, “Yeah, you can have it as long as I can access it with a phone call.”

“That won’t be an issue.”

I pulled out the dead guy’s wallet and said, “You can have this too. Nothing in it but money, but you might be able to get something from the leather or the dye or whatever CSI stuff you guys do.”

He took it, then said, “You think this attack was it?”

“We should all keep looking, but this one had the most infrastructure behind it, and, given the date and the target, I think this was the big finale of the fireworks show.”

Someone shouted from the scrum of authorities, and Brock said, “I have to get back to work. I appreciate the help.” He saw Carly still going through the passport and was polite enough not to demand it right then. He said, “Don’t lose any of the evidence.”

I said, “I won’t. I appreciate you keeping us out of it.” I shook his hand, and he jogged away.

Carly went through the passport page by page. She said, “This thing is brand-new. Only place it’s been used is to get to the United States.”

Knuckles said, “So?”

“They left from Morocco, but there’s no entry stamp for that country. They had to have received the passport there. How do some Berbers get a Saudi Arabian passport in Morocco?”

She flipped to the last page, and a card fluttered to the ground. She picked it up and said, “That’s how.”