Disclaimer and beta thanks in Part 1.

Leaving a review will earn you even more good luck than passing along an e-mail chain letter!

oooooooooooooooo

Chapter 7
Friday, November 19, 2005
10:05 A.M.
FBI field office

Upon entering the office, Don grabbed the first junior agent he could find who didn't look exceptionally busy. He'd visited Charlie's Dr. Anderson that morning along with a sketch artist and gotten descriptions and drawings of the two men he'd spoken to, and he needed them to be run through the FBI's databases as soon as possible. The young agent had nodded earnestly and headed off to run the search, Don looking after her and wondering if she could really be old enough to be an FBI agent. Shaking his head, he headed for the next most important thing on his list.

"Morning, Megan. How's it going?" he asked as he entered the room.

The slender agent yawned and looked at her watch. "It is still morning, isn't it?"

"Sorry to bring you in so early."

"Says the man who got to roll in at ten, not 4 A.M." Her smile told him she didn't mean it harshly. "It's not going anywhere yet. David and I have been taking turns with Ataud, and Granger wanted Ferza all to himself. They haven't said a word, though. I think they're going to be tough nuts to crack."

"Anything from their phone records?"

She yawned again and shook her head, reaching for a file folder on the table next to the monitor that showed David Sinclair looming over a short man seated in the room beyond the glass partition. "Take a look. Nothing jumped out at us, but we're running down all of the numbers in there to see who they've contacted since these two guys flew into town."

"Second layer of Charlie's search tree, huh?" When Megan nodded, he went on, "You think Colby needs a break?"

She gestured towards the other monitor. "You tell me."

Don leaned down and peered at the small screen. Two men were seated at a table, both unmoving and unspeaking. Colby was just staring at their suspect, who was looking at a point somewhere behind the agent's head. Don watched for a moment, but neither of the men moved a muscle. His brow crinkled. "How long has he been doing that?"

She checked her notepad. "Going on half an hour now. I'd say he was sleeping with his eyes open, but he blinks once in a while."

He chuckled. "One of those interrogation techniques he learned in Afghanistan?"

"I've never seen anything like it, but if a staring contest gets us useful information..." She shrugged.

"Just don't let him hear you call it that," Don said, looking over at the other monitor. "Have you and David both been in there at once?"

"I'm still not entirely sure how to play it with him," she said, nodding at Tomas Ataud. "I think he's the kind of guy who's going to completely ignore a woman, so I'm better off as Good Cop, since that's the role he's going to assign to me anyway. David seems to be doing just fine in the other role," she said as the African-American man slammed his hand on the table right in front of Ataud, who flinched slightly but made no reply.

"Well, we've got to keep at it. They've already shown their hand by refusing to say a word," Don said, looking through the one-way glass. "If they weren't trained in some kind of counter-interrogation tactics, they would at least be pleading their innocence by now."

Megan nodded. "So we have something, we just don't know what."

Don pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Let me give it a shot." He left the room and walked around the corner to the entrance to the interrogation room. Taking a deep breath and mentally preparing himself, he ran his ID badge through the electronic slot and opened the door.

David was still leaning over the other man, who was looking down at the table in stubborn silence. He looked up at Don's entrance, and Don gave him a short nod. "Take a break," he said in clipped tones, holding the door open.

David looked at him for a moment. Then he slowly stood up and gave Ataud a last glare before silently striding out of the room and pulling the door shut with a decisive slam.

Don stayed where he was for a few seconds, regarding the other man. Tomas Ataud had close-cropped curly black hair, skin only a shade darker than Don's own, and no features that betrayed his Lebanese heritage unless you looked closely. He was wearing a navy blue flannel shirt and jeans, and his cuffed hands were resting on the table in front of him. He didn't turn his head, and it took Don a second to realize that he was using the mirror to size Don up. When he saw Don's eyes on him, he looked back down at the table.

"Tomas Ataud," Don said, starting forward. "Why did you enter the United States on a false passport?"

As expected, the other man gave no reply. Don dropped into the hard-backed chair opposite him and said, "Did you know you were on the list of persons who are not approved to travel to the U.S.?" No response. "Do you know why you're on that list?"

After years of interrogations, Don had learned a variety of strategies for dealing with uncommunicative suspects. Dealing with his own frustration was often the first step in the process. Asking questions of someone who was doing their best to pretend you weren't in the room could get really old, really fast. It often led agents to start shouting out of frustration, which was sometimes an effective tactic, and sometimes not. He didn't think it would work here, so he forced himself to keep a lid on his emotions.

He opened the file folder he was still carrying. "You haven't contacted too many people since you've been here, according to your phone records. One call from your cell phone, three calls from your hotel. One of the hotel calls was to your buddy's cell, the other one to a pizza joint. Don't tell me you flew all the way here for the pizza."

Ataud's dark eyes were focused on Don, but his facial expression didn't change.

Don leaned slightly forward. "See, you've already made one mistake. Two, actually, if you count being caught on the surveillance tape. But you've screwed up since you were brought in here. So has your buddy next door. You know why?"

There might have been a flicker of anger in the other man's eyes, but Don wasn't sure if it was just a trick of the light. "You're playing this all wrong. You were brought in here on a relatively insubstantial charge. Not that we take it lightly when someone tries to sneak across our borders, but I'm sure you could have tried to talk your way out of it. But no, you've taken the wrong approach by clamming up like this." He leaned forward a little more. "Now we know you've got something going on here, Ataud. And we're not going to give up until we find out what it is. You've made sure of that."

The corner of his mouth turned up ever so slightly, and he spoke a single word. "Try."

Don abruptly stood up. "And that was mistake number three. Taunting the people who can make your life miserable. Now is when things start getting serious."

He was surprised to actually get a reply, although the cool, sardonic tone was as frustrating as the words themselves. "Unless you are planning on taking me to Guantanamo, I don't think there is anything...serious...you can do to me."

Don placed his hands deliberately on the table and leaned close to the other man's face, letting his own expression go cold and hard. He spoke deliberately. "You would be surprised."

He held that position for a moment longer, then pushed back off the table and gathered the file folder he had brought in. "I'll be back," he said as he strode to the door. David had obviously been watching from the other room, because he timed his opening of the door perfectly, allowing Don to continue out without breaking stride, while he himself re-entered for another try. Don recognized the mask falling into place over his fellow agent's features as he went past him into the room. He almost felt sorry for Ataud. Almost.

Back in the monitoring room, he dropped into the chair beside Megan and tossed the folder back on its pile, running a hand across his face as if to wash away the persona he'd adopted during the interrogation. "You're right. He's going to be tough. Not that we didn't expect it, but still."

She nodded agreement. "We're working to contact his family in London, see if they can give us any better idea as to why he might be here. His parents emigrated from Lebanon twenty-five years ago, and he and Ferza have lived all their lives in the U.K. He has a younger brother who's not on any watch lists, so that's probably worth checking out."

Don opened his mouth to say something else, but was distracted by the monitor showing the room where Colby was interrogating Ferza. "Hey, turn up the volume on that, Megan."

The suspect was saying something in a foreign language, in a regular and steady voice. By the rhythmic nature of the syllables and what they knew about the man, Don guessed it was verses of the Koran. But the weird thing was, Colby was speaking right along with him, his gaze never leaving the other man's.

The two of them watched in bewilderment for a moment, and then it began to make sense. Ferza's voice grew steadily louder, as if he were trying to drown out his interrogator, but Colby's volume increased right along with him. He spoke faster and faster, to no avail. Finally, he stopped, and the room was deafeningly quiet for a moment. Then he leaned forward and spoke in rapid-fire Arabic, gesturing angrily. Colby looked at him for a moment, and then spoke one or two quiet words in response. Then he rose from his chair and walked to the door.

Don exchanged a glance with Megan, but before either of them could say something, Colby was standing in the doorway. "You saw that?" he asked. His eyes had an intenseness to them that Don had only seen when they were about to go into a tactical situation, and his breathing was coming a little faster than it should.

"Have a seat, Granger," Megan said with what sounded to Don like calculated casualness.

His eyes flicked to hers, but he didn't move.

"What was that?" she asked, gesturing to the monitor. "Arabic? I thought Farsi or Pashtu would have been more useful in Afghanistan."

Colby gave a short nod. "Most Muslims believe that the Koran needs to be read in its original language. A lot of the guys we ran into were reciting verses as a kind of mantra, so eventually we learned to beat them at their own game." A flicker of something Don couldn't quite read passed across his eyes. "It shook Ferza up a bit. I'm letting him think it over before I go back in there."

"You should take a break," Don said, standing up and looking at him more closely. "Let him think it over for a couple of hours."

Colby shook his head firmly. "That's not the way to deal with these guys. Hard intensity, in their face until they break. That's the way to go. Believe me, it works."

"We're not talking Taliban soldiers here, Colby, we're talking two guys who aren't supposed to be in the country but who haven't done any criminal activities as far as we know."

The other agent's eyes flashed, and Don almost took a step back. But he laid a hand on Colby's arm instead, and said in a low tone, "Believe me, I appreciate your intensity in there." He jerked a thumb towards the monitor. "I think it's going to get us results. But I want to make sure that you're here, with us."

He got no reaction for a moment. Then the muscles under his hand relaxed, and Colby leaned slightly against the doorjamb. "Yeah, I'm here," he said, passing a hand over his eyes. "Maybe I will take that break."

"Mind if I come along?" Megan stood up and stifled a yawn. "I could use a cup of real coffee."

"Making sure I don't go mental on you, Reeves?"

Don took a step back and crossed his arms over his chest, amused at the byplay between his agents. Megan replied, "I'm just looking for a cup of coffee, Granger."

Colby regarded her for a moment, then jerked his head backwards. "All right, let's go."

He watched them walk down the hall, trading a few comments about their respective suspects. Then he heard a voice behind him in the hallway. "Agent Eppes?"

He turned to see the same young woman to whom he had given Dr. Anderson's sketches earlier that morning. "Hey, Janice. Have you got something?"

She nodded, handing him a printout of a California driver's license. "One of the men in those sketches you gave me was in the LAPD database from a routine traffic stop a couple of years ago. I got his driver's license number and ran it with the state databases."

He looked over the printout. Ryan Mott was thirty years old according to his license, with an address in Covina. The black-and-white picture showed a man with close-cropped hair and the faint line of a scar running down his left cheek. "Good work, Janice."

"Actually, there's more." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "I ran his social security number, and his most recent place of employment came up. It seemed like a coincidence, so I went ahead and gave them a call."

"And…?"

She handed him a second sheet of paper. "Ryan Mott was employed at the same Domino's Pizza that Ataud called from his hotel room."

Don scanned the page of Mott's employment history, recognizing the address at the end of the list. "You said 'was employed'."

She nodded and blew her wispy blond bangs out of her eyes. "He quit the next day. The store manager is looking through the records right now to verify that he was on that particular delivery, but it seems likely."

He nodded slowly. "That's great work, Janice. Thank you very much."

The other agent gave him a small smile, then said, "Agent Eppes, does this mean what I think it means?"

He regarded her for a moment. Janice Evans had been working at the L.A. field office for about three months, if he remembered correctly, fresh out of Quantico with an interest in counterterrorism. "What do you think it means?" he asked quietly.

He was pleased to see her straighten up and look at him seriously, not like a student answering a teacher, but a colleague answering a peer. "If I were doing the analysis, I would say it sounds like a sleeper cell has been activated."

"That's what I would say, too," he agreed with a sigh.

He noticed only a flicker of pleasure across her face at his answer before her face turned grim. This lent a whole new urgency to the case.