Page 78 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“She’s high on my list.”

CHAPTER 69

NED AND I ARRIVEDback in DC around one and went straight to a conference room in Rebecca Cantrell’s offices in Arlington to meet with her, Sampson, and top agents assigned to investigate the downing of AA 839.

I’d thought Cantrell would be very pissed off when Sampson told her that Captain Davis was in the wind, but she was only mildly irritated.

“He’ll pop up,” she said. “We’re watching his credit cards and bank accounts.”

John said, “Fiona Plum told me that when Davis was drunk, he talked about having to blow up entire villages in Iraq and Syria. He was thrown out of the American Airlines pilot program for drinking. But he evidently believes his ex-girlfriend killed herself and her daughter because of what he had to do over there.”

The U.S. attorney narrowed her eyes. “How’s that?”

“That’s what he told Plum. In any case, she said he’s angry. Very angry.”

“Noted,” Cantrell said, and she looked at Ned and me. “And in North Carolina?”

Mahoney said, “We’ve got army investigators looking into the connections between Davis, Leslie Parks, and whoever this Ibrahim guy is. We know now that someone in Parks’s fortress wiped down the guest bedroom and poured bleach down the guest bathroom’s drains.”

“You got nothing?”

“No,” I said. “They’ve identified multiple different sources of DNA inside the fortress, especially around the gun room and subbasement.”

Ned added, “Which is where we believe this Ibrahim may have made a mistake.”

“Quantico have the samples?” Cantrell asked.

“Already in analysis.”

“Good, then you’re all free to focus on this until we get results or Davis surfaces,” she said, clicking a key on her laptop. Three photographs of three different men in robes filled the screen on one wall of the conference room. They were all candid shots, two taken on the street, one at a café.

“A gift from the CIA,” the U.S. attorney said. “All three of these men worked with Leslie Parks during his gunrunning days. After Parks left the Middle East, the two men on the street in that picture went to work for the U.S. military and eventually got permission to immigrate here. The one in the café there, the guy smoking the hookah, is Sami Abdallah.”

Abdallah, she said, had been taken hostage and disappeared for almost a year after Parks’s weapon caravan was attacked andseized. He surfaced in the town of Qa’im on the Iraq-Syria border claiming that he’d been held prisoner by a pro-Iranian militia group but escaped. “He sought asylum, and we gave it to him three years ago,” she said, hitting another key on her laptop. The screen changed to an image of Abdallah’s green card.

“Turns out he’s right here in the area,” she went on. “Lives near that mosque in Gaithersburg with the imam that’s always screaming persecution and oppression.”

I said, “Is he a member of that mosque?”

“He is,” she said. “The FBI’s counterterrorism division has been keeping an eye on him and several other young men who live with him and attend the mosque. About three weeks ago, we lost the intercept on Abdallah’s phone. Or, rather, he stopped using the phone in favor of another one. An Orion.”

“Whoa,” Mahoney said. “Where’d he get something like that?”

I wanted to know the same thing, because an Orion encrypted phone was impossible to intercept and cost tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our government gave them to diplomats and others who needed to talk securely.

“More important,” Sampson said, “what’s he doing with it?”

“Exactly, John,” Cantrell said. “I suggest you three go and ask him.”

CHAPTER 70

ACCORDING TO THE LATESTintelligence from the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Sami Abdallah and three other men from the Gaithersburg mosque rented a small house in a loose group of manufactured homes, barns, and outbuildings set well back from a road west of town near Seneca Creek State Park.

Satellite images of the place showed it was surrounded by woods on three sides and a cornfield on the fourth. It looked as if it had once been a working farm with several families all living in the same area.

“Do we know who’s living in the other homes?” I asked when we gathered an hour before dark in another agricultural field about two miles from Abdallah’s place.

“They’re all owned by a single absentee landlord,” Mahoney said. “I talked to him in Florida on the way up. He calls the place Little Baghdad because his renters are all Iraqi refugees.He says there’s a family called the Shariffs — a mom, dad, and triplet girls — living across the way from Abdallah, who has two roommates. There are three more refugees living in the double-wide beyond Abdallah’s place, all males. He’s never had a problem with any of them, but then again, he hasn’t been there physically in more than a year.”

---