“Go for it,” Sneed told me. It almost seemed like a dare.

I stopped at the vending machines on my way back in and bought a bottle of water. It wasn’t much, but I wanted to bring something in with me besides files and questions.

When I opened the interview room door, the woman’s head jerked up as if I’d caught her off guard. Her dark hair was pulled back in a French braid, and her magenta silk blouse and gray pinstriped skirt looked wrong on her somehow, like someone else’s idea of American dress.

I came around and unlocked the cuff securing her to an eyebolt on the metal table.

She rubbed at the red mark around her wrist as I sat down but ignored the bottle of water I’d left for her.

“I’ve got something I want to show you,” I said. “You should look, at least. Just look.”

I opened one of my files and took out a screen capture from the night’s surveillance video at the parking garage. The image was grainy, but the eight of them were easy enough to make out, huddled next to a couple of SUVs.

When I slid the picture around to show her, my finger was on the woman at the center of their group.

“This is the one who shot and killed your husband,” I said, watching her face.

I wasn’t positive about the husband part — not until her eye twitched, and her lips tightened over her teeth, like she was holding in a scream, or maybe a curse.

“Do you want to tell me who she is?” I asked.

To my surprise, the woman answered.

“I don’t know,” she said in a thick Saudi accent. “Her, I would help you find, if I could. Evil bitch. Controlling. Hard.”

“Is she running Al Ayla’s Washington cell?” I asked, but already, she’d retreated back into silence.

“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “It’s about the kidnapping of the president’s children. Do you know if Al Ayla’s responsible?”

All I got there was more of the same. Silence, and she wouldn’t look at me.

“You know, it’s not too late to cut a deal here,” I said. That got her attention. It even got me some minimal eye contact. “The first one of you to talk is going to be on a plane back to Riyadh when this is all said and done. The rest are going to be here for a long, long time.”

“A deal?” she said then. “Do you think I am absolutely stupid?”

The question spoke for itself. If she wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t have asked.

I shrugged. “Believe what you want. This offer stands only as long as nobody else comes forward. If I get a knock on that door” — I thumbed over my shoulder — “then you and I are done here.”

I didn’t want to give her too much room to think, so I leaned in and kept talking, a little faster now, whatever came into my head.