It was no accident the Impala was bright red; the FBI had quietly intervened in the booking. In addition, the Bureau’s technicians had fitted the car with a beacon and bugged its interior. As a result, the analysts on duty on the Operations Floor at the National Counterterrorism Center heard Natalie singing softly to herself in French as she drove along the Dulles Access Road toward Washington. On one of the giant video screens, the traffic cameras tracked her every move. On another blinked the blue light of the beacon. Her mobile phone was emitting a signal of its own. Her French phone number appeared in a shaded rectangular box, next to the blinking blue light. The Office had real-time access to her voice calls, texts, and e-mails. And now that the phone was on American soil, connected to an American cellular network, the NCTC had access to them, too.
The bright red car passed within a few hundred feet of the Liberty Crossing campus and continued along Interstate 66 to the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia, where it turned into the surface parking lot of the Key Bridge Marriott. There the blinking blue light of the beacon came to a stop. But after an interval of thirty seconds—long enough for a woman to adjust her hair and retrieve a suitcase from the trunk of a car—the shaded rectangular box of the mobile phone moved toward the hotel’s entrance. It paused briefly at the reception desk, where the device’s owner, an Arab woman in her early thirties, veiled, French passport, stated her name for the clerk. There was no need to present a credit card; ISIS had already paid for her room charges and incidentals. Weary from a long day of travel, she gratefully accepted an electronic key card and wheeled her suitcase slowly across the lobby toward the elevators.
After pressing the call button, Natalie became aware of the attractive woman, late twenties, shoulder-length blond hair, knock-off Vuitton luggage, watching her from a barstool in the chrome-and-laminate lounge. Natalie assumed the woman to be an American intelligence officer and boarded the first available elevator without making eye contact. She pressed the button for the eighth floor and moved to the corner of the carriage, but as the doors were closing a hand appeared in the breach. The hand belonged to the attractive blonde from the lounge. She stood on the opposite side of the carriage and stared straight ahead. Her heavy lilac fragrance was intoxicating.
“What floor?” asked Natalie in English.
“Eight is fine.” The accent was French, the voice vaguely familiar.
They said nothing more to one another as the elevator climbed slowly upward. When the doors opened on the eighth floor, Natalie exited first. She paused briefly to take her bearings and then set off along the corridor. The attractive blond woman walked in the same direction. And when Natalie stopped outside Room 822, the woman stopped, too. It was then Natalie looked into her eyes for the first time. Somehow, she managed to smile.
They were the eyes of Safia Bourihane.
In preparation for Natalie’s arrival, the FBI had stationed a pair of agents, a man and a woman, in the same lounge of the Key Bridge Marriott. It had also hacked into the hotel’s security system, giving the NCTC unfettered access to some three hundred cameras. Both the agents and the cameras had noticed the attractive blond woman who joined Natalie in the elevator. The agents had made no attempt to follow the two women, but the cameras had shown no such restraint. They tracked their movement down the half-lit corridor, to the door of Room 822. It, too, had been penetrated by the FBI. There were four microphones and four cameras. All watched and listened as the women entered. In French, the blond woman murmured something the microphones couldn’t quite catch. Then, ten seconds later, the shaded rectangular box vanished from the giant display at the NCTC.
“Looks like the network just made contact with her,” said Carter, watching as the two women settled into the room. “Too bad about the phone going dark.”
“But not unexpected.”
“No,” agreed Carter. “It would have been too much to hope for.”
Gabriel asked to see a replay of the elevator video. Carter gave the order, and a few seconds later it appeared on the screen.
“Pretty girl,” said Carter.
“Natalie or the blond?”
“Both, actually, but I was referring to the blond. Think she’s a natural?”
“Not a chance,” replied Gabriel. He asked to see a close-up of the blond woman’s face. Again, Carter gave the order.
“Recognize her?”
“Yes,” said Gabriel with a glance toward Paul Rousseau, “I’m afraid I do.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s someone who has no business being in this country,” said Gabriel ominously. “And if she’s here, it means there are many more just like her.”
55
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
THE FRENCH PRESIDENT AND HIS glamorous ex–fashion model of a wife arrived at Joint Base Andrews at seven that evening. The motorcade that bore the couple from suburban Maryland to Blair House—the Federal-style guest mansion located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House—was the largest anyone could recall. The many street closures snarled the Potomac River crossings and turned downtown Washington into a parking lot for thousands of commuters. Unfortunately, the disruption to life in the capital was only going to get worse. Earlier that morning, the Washington Post had reported that the security operation surrounding the Franco-American summit was the most extensive since the last inauguration. The primary threat, the newspaper said, was an attack by ISIS. But even the venerable Post, with its many sources inside the U.S. intelligence community, was unaware of the true nature of the peril hanging over the city.
By that evening, the intense efforts to prevent an attack were centered on a hotel at the foot of Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia. In a room on the eighth floor were two women, one an agent of Israeli intelligence, the other an agent of a man called Saladin. The presence of the second woman on American soil had set off alarm bells inside the NCTC and throughout the rest of the U.S. homeland security apparatus. A dozen different government agencies were trying desperately to discover how she had managed to get into the country and how long she had been there. The White House had been advised of the situation. The president was said to be livid.
At half past eight that evening, the two women decided to leave the hotel for dinner. The concierge advised them to avoid Georgetown—“It’s a zoo because of the traffic”—and directed them instead to a chain bar-and-grill in the Clarendon section of Arlington. Natalie drove there in the bright red Impala and parked in a public lot off Wilson Boulevard. The bar-and-grill was a no-reservations establishment, infamous for the size of its portions and the length of its lines. The wait for a table was thirty minutes, but there was a small round high-top available in the bar. The menu was ten pages of spiral-bound plastic laminate. Safia Bourihane leafed desultorily through it, mystified.
“Who can eat so much food?” she asked in French, turning another page.
“Americans,” said Natalie, glancing at the well-fed clientele around her. The room was high-ceilinged and impossibly loud. As a result, it was the perfect place to talk.
“I think I’ve lost my appetite,” Safia was saying.
“You should eat something.”
“I ate on the train.”
“What train?”
“The train from New York.”
“How long were you in New York?”
“Just a day. I flew there from Paris.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I told you I would go back to France one day.”