How are they going to do that? All the flights are grounded.

Swann raised a finger. All the commercial flights are grounded. Private flights are still taking off. Theres a private jet at Kennedy airport gassed up and ready to go. The Iranian mission is a few blocks from the Midtown Tunnel. If and when the traffic clears up, its a straight shot through the tunnel, out to the Van Wyck Expressway and down to Kennedy.

Can we have him arrested if he comes out?

Swann shrugged. The NYPD and Homeland arent cooperating. I think Begley is pissed that you were right, and hes going to bite his own nose off on this. We could detain Nassar ourselves, if were willing to fight for him, and if he doesnt come out in some kind of disguise, or packed away in the trunk of a car.

I want every exit from that mission watched, Luke said. We cant let him get away, even if it means we

Luke? Luke? Trudys voice was back, but not her face. Luke, were just getting some intel on that van. Its been spotted. They tracked it to a junkyard in Northeast DC. Its parked. Were going to have satellite imagery of it in about thirty seconds.

Luke was already standing. He glanced at Ed Newsams chair. Newsam wasnt in it. Luke looked at the door of the conference room. Ed was at the door, holding it open.

Im waiting for you, Ed said.

Luke looked around the conference room. Don was sitting up in his chair, staring straight head.

Don?

He nodded.

Go.

Chapter 27

1:45 p.m.

Ivy City - Northeast Washington, DC

The man was a ghost.

He had no name. He had no family. He carried no identification. If he were fingerprinted, his prints would turn up in no criminal or military database that existed. He had a past, of course he did, but that hardly mattered now. He had broken from that past life, and then he had broken from the man who once led that life. Now he lived in a sort of eternal present. The present had its rewards.

He lay on his stomach on the roof of an abandoned three-story building, he and his long-range rifle, the THOR M408. He thought of it as the Mighty THOR, and he and the rifle acted as one. He was its life-support system. It was the source of his creative expression.

All around them, the roof was piled up with discarded junk. Clothes, boxes, an old microwave oven, a shattered black and white television. There was a rusty shopping cart up here, as well as the entire drive train from what had probably once been a pickup truck. How or why someone had carried that thing up here…

It wasnt worth thinking about.