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"I can see that I mean, where are you from originally?"
"Oh I'm sorry. Greece." Hasan was suddenly grateful that al-Yamani had made them rehearse their stories over and over.
Sherwood nodded and then looked at the other two men in the vehicle. Something about the man in the backseat struck him. He was small, like a teenager, and he looked jumpy.
"Did I do something wrong?" Hasan wanted to distract the police officer's attention from the nervous scientist.
Foreigners,Sherwood thought. "This isn't exactly the best place to pull over."
"Sorry."
"You should be more careful when you're pulling a trailer like this. Your tail end is hanging out in traffic." Sherwood would probably let him off with a verbal warning, but he'd make him sweat a bit. "Sit tight while I run your license, and I'll be back in a couple of minutes." Sherwood took another look at the passenger in the backseat. There was something about the guy, but he couldn't put his finger on it.
Sherwood began walking back to his cruiser. He paused briefly and memorized the plate on the truck and then stopped at the trailer and looked at the heavy padlock. The padlock and the Georgia plates caused something to click. And then he thought of the dark skin and the accents. Greece wasn't the Middle East, but it was close and besides, Sherwood didn't have the foggiest idea what a Greek guy was supposed to sound like. He'd been tired when he came into work at 5:00 a.m., but he seemed to remember some stink that the Feds were making about a couple of foreign guys they were looking for who had been in the Atlanta area. He couldn't remember specific features from the photos he had glanced at, but he did remember that one of the guys looked a little young to be a terrorist.
Sherwood stepped away from the trailer and looked back at the truck. The driver was watching him intently in the big side-view mirror. The twenty-five-year-old deputy put his right hand back on his gun and with his left hand he toggled the transmit button on his radio.
Tilting his head toward the shoulder mike he said, "Dispatch this is "
The deputy never finished his sentence. Nor did he see what hit him. A passing car swerved from the right lane of traffic and struck him in the left leg, sending him bouncing off the trailer and to the ground, where his head hit violently. His eye
s fluttered briefly and then closed.
* * *
Sixty-Six
WASHINGTON,D.C.
The decision to head to the airport had been relatively easy. Reimer hadn't heard back from the Russians, and the bevy of search warrants that had been served had yet to produce any explosive evidence. They were at a standstill in an investigation that Rapp had no real control over. In addition, Rapp's people were telling him that they thought al-Yamani was already gone. The upper echelon of these terrorist organizations didn't martyr themselves. They let the new recruits do that. Several of the CIA's top analysts were predicting that al-Yamani had already left the country and was on his way back to his cave.
Rapp checked the clock. It was 3:08, which meant he'd be cutting things a little close for his flight. He was just pulling into long-term parking at Dulles when his digital phone rang. He checked the number before answering. It was McMahon at the Counterterrorism Center.
"What's up?"
"You at the airport yet?"
"Yep. Just pulling into the parking ramp."
"Well we've got an interesting development that I thought you might want to hear about."
Rapp rolled down his window and grabbed the ticket. "I'm listening." The arm popped up, and Rapp drove under it.
"The Virginia State Police called. We've got a possible I.D. on Imtaz Zubair."
Rapp eased up on the gas. "Is he in custody?"
"No, and this is where the story gets a little confusing. The report is that he was I.D.'d by a deputy sheriff who pulled a vehicle over for a routine traffic stop. Apparently the deputy was on his way back to his car to run a check on the driver when he was hit by a passing car and knocked unconscious."
"When and where?"
"Just north of Richmond at approximately one this afternoon."
Richmond was only an hour and a half south of D.C. "Have you talked to the deputy?"
"No, and we can't. At least not for a while. They just rushed him into surgery to relieve the swelling on his brain."
Rapp knew from the security tapes at the Ritz in Atlanta that Zubair had been there on Wednesday evening, and had left in the middle of the night.Why was he headed toward Washington? "Do we have a description of the car?"