“Before he makes the call,” I said to DeYoung, “let’s see if Cyber can trace the number or locate the other party when they pick up.”

“Right.” Then DeYoung directed his words to Reese again. “We’re the FBI. If we want someone to disappear, he’ll disappear. We can give people a new start, erase the past. We have the resources—all we need is the motivation to use them to your advantage.”

Then Reese told us about the Tranadyl and the effects it would have on anyone who snorted it while it was mixed with Selzucaine.

He confirmed that shipments of Selzucaine had been coming in for the last six months, so the supply chain was in place—all the distributors, the buyers—and now all they needed was for one final shipment to go out, one that was tainted and would enter the stream the same as the others had.

“Only this one isn’t the same,” he told us. “It’ll get powdered, packaged, and sent out, and anyone who uses it will be snorting themselves into a coma or a casket.”

We had to stop this.

We wrapped things up with him, with the agents in Phoenix waiting for word from Angela at Cyber before having him make the call to his contact, a man he knew only by the name Ibrahim.

Sasha had mentioned that name to us earlier as well. DeYoung assigned one of the new agents to find out all he could about any Ibrahims in Blake’s network.

Reese had mentioned two o’clock, so we had a deadline, but we didn’t have a location.

It was a start.

++++

Blake looked over his silent ladies, all treated and now drying in preparation for being shipped.

He’d never really liked the term “fall guy,” but in this case, it was probably the best description of the role Ibrahim was going to play.

The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword was an organization that the original Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir had founded nearly four years ago. Over time, numerous men had taken on the identity of the terrorist—Blake doing so himself after he removed his predecessor from the role with a blade to the throat.

The Brigade was responsible for over a dozen terrorist acts, including the bioweapons attack last summer in Detroit that had resulted in the CDC shutting down and quarantining a two-block section of the city.

Now, this week, the next attack would undoubtedly result in expanded efforts to quell the rise of extremism both domestically and, because of Ibrahim’s ties to Syrian extremists, internationally.

The president had campaigned on the promise of being tough on terror, but once he was elected, things had shifted toward reductions in the military with a new strategy of using private security firms whenever possible in a bid to “trim excessive spending” and keep the military “lean and agile.”

Which worked out perfectly for Blake.