“Yeah, I got it the first couple times.”
“— ACLU’s going to have their hands full before this thing is over. That’s all.”
Agent Green reached down and took the last bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from the greasy McDonald’s bag at his feet. He knew he was better off not going there with Kravetz, especially this early in the day. The Bureau was spread thin, and their relief wouldn’t be coming for another ten hours. Maybe more.
Then, as Green looked up again, something caught his attention. It was a well-dressed couple, coming out of the mosque at the back of the crowd. Nothing strange there — except they were both loaded down with luggage.
“What’s with the suitcases?” he said. Kravetz took her eye off the periscope to see what Green meant. He put a finger up to the screen. “That couple, right there.”
The woman had stopped to lower her hijab. The man, clean shaven with a Ravens cap on his head, took up the larger bag she’d just set down and handed her a briefcase to carry instead.
“Maybe they came in on a red-eye,” Kravetz offered. “Went straight to services from the airport.”
“Maybe,” Green said. “Stay with them.”
He watched as Kravetz put the couple in the center of her frame. She pressed a thumb control on the joystick and zoomed in close enough to snap a still image of their faces just before they continued up
the sidewalk.
“Nice work,” Green said.
Kravetz was still watching the young Middle Eastern couple walk away.
“Nice ass,” Green went on. “She’s kind of smoking hot, isn’t she?”
“I’m sending this in,” Kravetz said dryly. But yes, the woman was definitely hot.
With a few keystrokes, the image was on its way to IDENT. Both faces would be electronically logged and then scanned against an international database of known terrorists and persons of interest. Secret Service’s facial recognition system would pick it up, too.
“See, this is exactly what I’m talking about,” Kravetz said. “Do you know how many random, innocent people are pouring into the system right now?”
“There must be some kind of compelling intel on that mosque,” Green said. “They’ve got us on this corner for a reason.”
“Yeah, us and a hundred other JTTF teams on a hundred other corners. This is a needle in a haystack. On a good day.”
Agent Green took a bite of his sandwich and tried not to think about it. They had a long shift ahead, and they were already talking in circles. Even if Kravetz was right — and she probably was — there was no sense in admitting it now. He’d never hear the end of it.
AFTER OUR EARLY morning meeting at CIA headquarters, Ned Mahoney and I were both detailed straight over to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, also in Langley. It’s housed in a secure building called Liberty Crossing, or LX1 for short.
The command center was a cavernous space with the soft lighting of a movie theater. But the volume was more like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and the tension was sky high.
Thousands of personnel had been dispatched to locations all over the city, and reps from every major agency had been assigned to this room, like me. Each area was marked with quickly made signs taped to the front of the desks — HOSTAGE AND RESCUE, MPD, CIA, MOBILE CTOC COMMUNICATIONS, and on it went.
Beyond the rail yard incident itself, we had a whole new element to deal with this morning. As of five a.m., Homeland Security had raised the terror threat level for Washington’s mass transit system from orange to red. All subway service, bus routes, and commuter trains were suspended until further notice.
This was only the second time any sector had gone red since they established the alert system after 9/11. There was no soft-selling it to the locals anymore.
Reports were steadily coming in that people were starting to flee the city in noticeable numbers.
The story had gone fully national, too. CNN was up on several screens around the room, covering the shootings and transit shutdown to the exclusion of everything else. They had a live helicopter shot of the rail yard, crawling with TV crews.
You could see officers from the Explosive Ordnance Division in their bulky suits, climbing in and out of the subway cars, like something right out of The Hurt Locker. It was the kind of imagery news directors love, and law enforcement hates.
I took my seat next to Javier Crist, an MPD sergeant who worked at LX1 full-time. He had the computer-assisted 911 dispatch up on one of the screens in front of him, monitoring the distress and emergency calls that were pouring in from everywhere. Our job was to gather information from the field, report it to the room, and send back a constant stream of leads for MPD to run down.
“Welcome to Camp Hell” was all Crist got out before he had to take another call.
That was the extent of my orientation. My own phone was already ringing.