people he despised but rather their government, and sad as it might be, citizens had been paying the price for flawed and brutal policies for millennia. For the people here, it was simply a matter of fate finally catching up with them. Fate and Allah’s will. Besides, he reminded himself, what was coming for these people was but a fraction of what his own country had suffered. While the tragic tale of his missionary parents was technically false, it was, in spirit, true enough. The streets of Zagreb and Rijeka and Osijek and dozens of others had been awash in the blood and misery of Muslims for decades, while the West did nothing to help. What would have happened, Kaseke wondered, if it had been blond-haired and blue-eyed Christian children being slaughtered in the streets of London or Los Angeles? What then?
As the e-mail instructed, Kaseke drove his 1995 Ford Ranger to the Trailways bus station on Sycamore between Third Street and Park Avenue. He pulled the Ranger into the parking lot of Doyle’s Pub, then walked back down the block to the bus station and went inside. The key he’d received in the mail a week earlier fit locker number 104. Inside he found a thick cardboard box wrapped in brown kraft paper. It was heavy, nearly thirty pounds, but reinforced with filament tape. There was no writing on the paper. He removed the box, placed it on the floor between his feet, then looked around to ensure that no one was watching before using the sleeve of his sweatshirt to wipe off the locker key. Had he touched anything else? Left fingerprints anywhere nearby? No, just the key.
Kaseke picked up the box and walked outside, then back down the block to his truck. The box went in the passenger-side door and on the seat. He got in on the other side and turned the ignition key, then paused, briefly wondering if he should put the box on the floorboards. If he got in an accident . . . No, he thought. Not necessary. He knew what was in the box, or at least he had a good idea, given the training curriculum he’d been put through in the camp. They’d trained him well to do one thing and one thing only.
This cargo was perfectly harmless. For now.
58
THEIR LEADS INTO WHAT, if anything, the Emir and the URC were planning were three: old e-mail intercepts, which had yielded little of use, save a birth announcement that seemed to have pushed every URC cell into radio silence, as well as perhaps moving some URC pieces around the board; Hadi, a courier and a fresh face on the scene; and the flash drive Chavez had inadvertently liberated from one of the tangos at the Tripoli embassy takedown. So far the fact that the URC was using steganography had given them nothing but hundreds of gigabytes of photos from URC-affiliated websites dating back eight years. Finding a five-kilobyte message embedded in a JPEG that was two hundred times that size was not only time-consuming but daunting.
Their fifth and most promising lead happened by accident, a finger that had kept a camera’s shutter button pressed down for a few seconds longer than intended.
Of two dozen or so pictures Jack had taken of Hadi in Chicago, three were keepers, showing the courier’s face either in profile or on the oblique, and in good enough light. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t Hadi’s face that became of interest to The Campus but rather his hands. When it came to intel work, Jack knew, it wasn’t always about finding what you were looking for but rather seeing what’s in front of you.
“This one here,” Jack said, touching the forward button on the remote. The next photo slid onto the conference room’s LCD TV screen. It showed Hadi stepping up on the curb and sidestepping a fellow pedestrian on the way to the door. Near the bottom of the frame, barely visible in shadow, Hadi’s hand and the stranger’s hand were pressed together, and between them, an indistinguishable object.
“Brush pass,” Clark said, leaning closer. “Clean, too.”
“Good catch, Jack,” Hendley said.
“Thanks, boss, but it was dumb luck.”
“No such thing, mano,” Chavez said. “Luck is luck. Take it as it comes.”
“So we’ve got a second face,” Sam Granger said. “What’s it do for us?”
“Nothing. Not by itself,” Jack said. “But this might get us somewhere.” He touched the forward button again. “The guy’s suitcase, blown up and sharpened.