represent him.”
“What? No,” Nolan said. “No, just sit here, I’m not admitting to nothing because I didn’t do anything.”
Bree said, “How about cutting off people’s heads? You did that, didn’t you, M?”
Wendover said, “Mr. Nolan, I advise you not to answer.”
Nolan shook his head violently. “I do not know what they’re talking about.”
“Are you M?” Mahoney asked. “Simple question.”
Nolan’s brow knitted. “That a name or something?”
“You know it is.”
“What, like some rapper?”
“You’re saying you are not M?” Bree said.
“I can say without a doubt that I am not Em or Eminem or whoever this dude is, and I have never, ever killed anyone, much less chopped off a bunch of people’s heads.”
On the other side of the mirror, behind Mahoney and Bree, I keyed my mike, said, “The blood he splattered on my windshield.”
Bree nodded, said, “You’re sure, William? Because Dr. Cross says you threw a blood balloon at his windshield out on the Beltway.”
“Blood balloon?” Wendover said. “Do not answer that question, Mr. Nolan.”
He ignored her. “That was fake blood, and so what? It’s like a kid’s prank.”
“Except that wasn’t fake blood,” Mahoney said. “That was a blood cocktail taken from several different human beings. We haven’t done the entire DNA workup yet, Mr. Nolan, but the smart money is on the blood matching the heads and, therefore, you.”
Nolan lost all color and looked dazed by what he’d just been told.
“Okay,” Wendover said, gathering her things and standing. “I am out of here.”
“Stop!” Nolan said. “Why?”
She glared at him. “Because, Mr. Nolan, I represent an innocent man who’s in jail, accused of the heinous crimes you’ve been involved in.”
“Heinous?” he said, looking after her as she left the room. “I’ve never done anything heinous in my entire life!”
Wendover shut the door behind her. I was about to go out into the hallway to talk to her when Nolan said, “I admit I’ve done things I’m not proud of, and I did time for them, but nothing heinous. Nothing remotely heinous.”
“But you can see where this is going, William,” Bree said. “Your blood balloon. The heads. The bodies. You must already be fearing the day they execute you.”
“Wait, now. I … ” He struggled and then apparently came to a decision. “I was given the balloon. I was told the blood was fake, you know, movie-prop stuff.” In the observation booth, we all leaned forward as one.
“Who told you that, Mr. Nolan?” Bree asked. “Who gave you the balloon? And who told you to visit Marty Forbes in jail and act like Kyle Craig?”
Nolan closed his eyes, said, “He calls himself M.”
CHAPTER 88
SHORTLY AFTER SEVEN THAT EVENING, in the Homeland Security offices at Union Station, Mahoney, Sampson, Bree, and I crowded around Lieutenant Edith Prince, a TSA officer with access to the archival feeds from cameras mounted in and around the transportation hub.
We asked her to bring up the footage from several days before, when Nolan had been caught on-camera. The time stamp said 4:01 p.m. when the Kyle Craig lookalike appeared in the feed, walked through the main hall of the rail station, and disappeared into the Metro.
“He told us he went to a locker before going to the Metro,” Bree said.
It took a few tries before Prince picked him up on another camera feed, this one overlooking a bank of lockers open for use between six a.m. and midnight.
On the TSA lieutenant’s screen, Nolan appeared at 3:54 p.m. He went to locker C-2, one of the larger storage bins. It was open.
Nolan reached inside and up. He groped around, then pulled his hand out in a loose fist and put it in the pocket of his jacket. The door swung shut. Nolan left.
Exactly the way he had described his actions to Bree in the interrogation room.
“What happened just there?” Prince asked.
“Nolan says he retrieved a claim check for a piece of carry-on luggage in storage at the Willard Hotel,” Bree said.
“Now we just need to figure out who put the claim check in the locker, and the luggage at the hotel,” Mahoney said.
“Can’t help you with the hotel,” Prince said, and she gave her computer an order. “But just maybe …”
The viewer played backward at six times normal speed. I had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen. My mind kept leaping back to the Kyle Craig lookalike’s claim that he was contacted two years before through an anonymous Panamanian server and an e-mail account belonging to someone named M.
The sender was aware of Nolan’s circumstances, that he