Mourad smiled. “I will call the Globe for you,” he said. “I will call this other distributor for Arabic ones. Today, maybe we drive around in my car you fixed for me. Find a good place for you to sell. You need permission, so the police do not arrest you. I will find out about that too.”

“Oh, my brother,” Aziz said. “Thanks to you, so much, thank you.”

“Go get your coat,” Mourad said.

Aziz ran to their bedroom. His coat was not in the closet. He went into the living room. Not there. “Mourad,” he said, “have you seen my coat?”

Mourad put his head out the door to his and Heather’s bedroom. “I will look.”

“It is brown, short one.”

Aziz could not find anything lately. His shoes, his keys, they were always where he thought they were not. A few weeks ago, he noticed his alarm clock by his bed, instead of across the room. If he kept it by his bed, he just turned it off in his sleep. It was always, always, across the room.

“Here it is.” Mourad handed him his coat.

“My question is, why wait?” asked the Boston cop. April could feel everyone in the room not liking him much. But they agreed with him.

“For starters,” her deputy, Mark Blake, said, “they don’t have a bomb yet.”

“What they have is everything but the box that says BOMB to put it in,” said another agent.

“What’s the damage with what they have, just ballpark?” That was a red tie.

“There’s a lot of variables,” began the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent.

“You told me this could blow a crater the size of Boston Common,” said the state trooper.

The ATF agent tried again. “That’s right, but that’s assuming—”

“That’s assuming they don’t want to put this on airplanes,” said FBI Agent Melhaney.

“Wasn’t there someone CIA captured in Indonesia who wanted to blow a dozen aircraft in the sky at once? Gave it a test run and some Japanese businessman got killed.” This was someone from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “Liquid explosive—in a plastic bottle. For baby oil, I think. Went through metal detectors easily.”

“They could be filling shampoo bottles with EGDN and sending operatives to Logan as we speak.”