“I appreciate it.”
“Hey, you want to come out tonight? Grab some beers before we head back?”
“Thanks, but I’ve got plans.”
“Yeah, I bet you do.” Cole sounded like he was smiling now. “Be sure to tell her hi for me.”
Another call came in as Derek hung up. The Delphi Center.
“Hey there.”
“Derek, it’s Mia Voss.”
“I figured.”
“I completed those tests on your boots,” she said, and something in her voice set off a warning bell.
“Yeah, I was going to swing by there tomorrow on my way back through.”
“This won’t wait till tomorrow,” she told him. “I’m coming to you.”
* * *
“Our facial-recognition software is cutting-edge,” Elizabeth said. “It’s good against disguises, even plastic surgery. But the best countermeasure out there is a burka.”
Gordon watched her skeptically from across the conference table. He and everyone else in the room clearly weren’t sold on her female accomplice theory.
“All this is based on a smell?” Gordon asked.
“It was prompted by that, yes, and then an eighteen-inch-long hair recovered from the motel room,” she said. “I believe we should seriously consider the idea that the elusive accomplice we’ve been searching for could be female. I mean, why shouldn’t it be a woman?”
“How about a couple thousand years of tradition?” Torres said. “How about strict religious beliefs? Their whole motive for this thing is their anti-Western ideology.”
“Their strict religious beliefs didn’t keep them away from the Pussycat three nights running,” Lauren countered. “Looks to me like they’re willing to bend the rules when it suits them.”
“Let’s get back to the facts,” Gordon said. “Did anyone at the motel actually see a woman coming or going from this room we’re looking at?”
“Not that we’ve been able to locate,” Elizabeth said. “But one of the maids told us she heard what she thought was a female voice coming from the room one morning when she walked by.”
“Maybe they had one of the Pussycats over,” Torres said.
Elizabeth glanced around, frustrated. “Let’s just assume for a minute that Tango Two is a woman. It makes their plot so much easier, especially in terms of facial-recognition software.” She focused her attention on Gordon. “The vast majority of the faceprints in the terrorist database are male. If she had a decent passport, a good forgery, she could have walked right through immigration posing as a British national or a Canadian or someone from any of our other non-visa countries. We don’t have her prints or her photo on file, so how would we know?”
“It would be in keeping with their MO,” Lauren said, throwing her a lifeline. “We know two of these guys posed as Latin American businessmen so they could get over here and then sneak through a border tunnel. With the right passport in hand, a woman wouldn’t even have to sneak.”
“What do we know about these guys’ wives and sisters?” Torres asked Gordon.
He was leaning back in his chair, contemplating the whiteboard where investigators had taped photos and biographical info about the two known terrorists. The two unknowns—the driver of the Chevy Cavalier and now the passenger from the narco sub—had no pictures on the board yet, only big red question marks.
“Neither of them is married,” Gordon said. “As for sisters, we’re running that down now. What we do know is that Rasheed and Ameen lived in London at the same time and attended the same mosque.”
“So lots of connection points, and maybe that extends to others in the family,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, but isn’t the whole family on a watch list?” Torres asked.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, “but even if they are, what do we really know about the women? That’s my point. We don’t have their images or prints on file. And while we’ve been busy combing the globe looking for the men, one of the women in either of these families could have slipped into this country months or even years ago to start laying the groundwork for an attack.”
The door opened, and Potter entered the room, juggling an armload of files.
“Hi.” He glanced around, then dumped the folders at an empty place at the table. “Updates on the families.” He opened a file. “Neither Ameen nor Rasheed is married, which we already knew. As for sisters, between Ameen and Rasheed, there are four. Add the sisters-in-law, and we’re up to eight.” He glanced around the room. “Ameen’s brother has three wives, and Rasheed’s brother Ahmed had a wife.”
“The brother who was killed in the drone strike?” Elizabeth asked. “Maybe it’s the widow.”
“Doubtful,” Potter said. “She’s actually in the system, because she attended college in England, which was where they met. The Brits have a jacket on her from when she applied for a student visa.”
“What about pictures?” Gordon asked.
“Those are much harder to come by,” Potter said. “We have Rasheed’s sister-in-law, like I mentioned. But other than that . . .” He thumbed through the papers. “It’s thin. We have a couple of surveillance pictures from public venues. Of course, the women are covered. The only shots we have that show any facial details are from years ago.” He pulled a picture from one of the files. “Here’s Rasheed with his family at a soccer match. He’s nineteen in this picture, and the only reason it was taken was that his father is standing next to the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., which attracted the Agency’s attention, so they caught the shot.” Potter stepped over and pinned the photo to the board with a magnet.
“We should focus on Rasheed’s family,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe losing a brother to a drone strike caused one of the sisters to shirk gender traditions and join the jihad.”
“If her parents would allow it,” Potter said. “These two families are very conservative.”
Elizabeth glanced at Potter’s mountain of files, then at Gordon. He and Torres still looked doubtful, which was probably a good indicator of how the rest of the team would react when they heard this theory.
“We need to confirm this one way or another,” Torres said, “so we don’t waste everyone’s time. What do the CSIs have from the submarine?”
“Still working on it,” Gordon said. “But we have a new lead on who might have been the passenger in the submarine, assuming he’s the one who murdered the ship channel worker, Palicek. The victim’s Avalanche was discovered in a vacant lot a few miles from the scene where the body was dumped. Someone had doused the front seat with gasoline and set it on fire.”
“Probably to destroy prints,” Lauren said. “Which makes me think they know we have them on file. Any chance we can get anything useful?”
“From the truck, it doesn’t look good,” Gordon said. “But police recovered a discarded gas can not far from the vehicle, and the prints on that might give us our best lead yet about who killed Palicek.”
“What about evidence from the motel?” Torres asked.
“We’re waiting on DNA from the motel room and also the Chevy Cavalier,” Gordon said. “Preliminary tests can tell us whether we’re dealing with any female subjects, but that may not mean anything. Just because a woman was in the motel room at some point or in the car—even if her DNA’s all over the steering wheel—that doesn’t mean she’s a terrorist. It’s not like we have DNA on file to compare it to, and it could have been left by someone not involved.”
“What about familial DNA?” Elizabeth suggested. “I’ve seen it used to solve cases before. We have Rasheed’s from the autopsy. We can find out if the DNA at any of these crime scenes is from the same family line. And if so, if there’s a Y chromosome.”
Gordon nodded. “Good idea, but that technique works best with people who share the same mother. As Potter pointed out, a lot of the men in these families have multiple wives. How many wives does Rasheed’s father have?”
Potter shuffled through one of his folders. “That would be . . . three. Rasheed’s mother was the first, which is sort of an honor position.”