Homeland Security could even shut down the bridges and put checkpoints on the highway if they wanted to, but that wasn’t my call.

By the time Ned and I got back up to the top level, everything on that end had been contained. One of the SWAT sergeants, Enrique Vaillos, was sitting on the bumper of the same Audi where we’d taken cover. The back of his hand was up against his mouth. It looked like he’d gotten a nasty pop in the face during the takedown.

“What’s our status up here?” Ned asked.

“Five in custody, one dead,” he said, “and two —?”

“Still missing,” I said.

Farther up the row of cars, a tall Saudi man in a gray suit was laid out flat on the ground. His head was turned our way so you could see the open, glassy eyes — also, the perfectly round black hole in his forehead. Even now, it sent a chill rolling down my back.

“What happened?” I asked.

Vaillos shook his head. “It was the damndest thing. That chick? The one who got away? Just before she ran, she turned and put a fast one in the guy’s head, point-blank. I don’t know why she did it, but I’ll tell you what. It’s all she had time for. Probably saved one of my guys’ lives.”

He turned away and spit a mouthful of red on the cement.

“Whatever. I ain’t going to lose sleep over it. These people want to act like a bunch of cannibals, I say let ’em. Just makes our job easier.”

I was thinking about the woman again, and how she wasn’t going to make our job easier.

THE “AL AYLA FIVE” were transferred to a. U.S. Marshals holding facility at the DC Jail on Massachusetts Avenue. A wing of eight-by-ten soundproof interview rooms was cleared, and the suspects were brought in one by one. Above all, there would be no exchange of information between them.

We worked in teams, rotating from suspect to suspect. I was with Mahoney, along with a forensic psychiatrist from the CIA, a ranking rep from Homeland Security, and an FBI field office supervisor, Corey Sneed, who took the lead. That was fine with me. I kept my focus where I needed it — on the Coyle kids.

Presumably, these people were Saudi nationals, but none of them was carrying any identification, and none of them would talk to us. Nothing. Not even to ask for a lawyer, though we suspected they spoke English.

Our strong assumption was that the whole eight-member group had been composed of four couples, given Al Ayla’s m.o. up to this point. If that was true, then one of these women had just lost a husband. Maybe that was something we could use.

After two hours of getting nowhere, I took my best guess and asked to speak privately with the one woman who had seemed most on edge.