And finally I heard "Secure. The building is secure! All floors secure!"

But nothing about Geoffrey Shafer, nothing about the Weasel.

Chapter 50

The HRT and NYPD SWAT teams were swarming around the building. All the doors had been blown off their hinges, and several windows were shattered. So much for "knock and announce" protocol, but the plan seemed to have worked well from what I could see so far. Except for finding Shafer. Where was that son of a bitch? I'd missed him like this a couple of times before.

The woman who'd gone out the top-floor window was dead, which is what happens when you plunge headfirst three stories down onto a sidewalk. I congratulated a few HRT guys as I made my way through the top floor; they did the same for me.

I met Michael Ainslie on the stairs. "Washington wants you involved with the interrogations," he told me, not seeming too pleased. "There are six of them. How do you want to handle it?"

"Shafer?" I asked Ainslie. "Anything on him?"

"They say he isn't here. We don't know for sure. We're still looking for him."

I couldn't help feeling a letdown about the Weasel, but I sucked it up. I walked inside a workspace that had been turned into a quasi-apartment. Sleeping bags and a few stained mattresses were strewn across the bare wooden floor. Five males and a woman sat together handcuffed like prisoners of war, which I suppose they were.

I stared at them without saying a word at first.

Then I pointed to the youngest-looking male: small, thin, wire-rimmed glasses, scruffy beard, of course. "Him," I said, and started to walk out of the room. "I want that one. Bring him now!"

After the young male was taken from the main living area to a smaller adjoining bedroom, I looked around the main room again.

I pointed to another youngish male with long curly black hair and a full beard. "That one," I said, and he was also escorted out. No explanation.

Next I was introduced to an FBI interpreter, a man named Wasid who spoke Arabic, Farsi, Pashto. We entered the bedroom next door together.

"He's probably Saudi, possibly all of them are," the interpreter told me on the way in. Wherever he was from, the small, thin young man seemed extremely nervous. Sometimes Islamic terrorists are more comfortable with the idea of dying than with being captured and questioned by the Devil. That was my leverage here: I was the Devil.

I encouraged the translator to engage the terrorist suspect in small talk about his hometown and then his difficult transition to life in New York, the Devil's den. I asked that he slip in that I was a fairly good man and one of the few FBI agents who wasn't inherently evil. "Tell him I read the Koran. Beautiful book."

In the meantime, I sat and tried to model the terrorist's behavior, to mimic it, without being too obvious. He sat forward in his chair. So did I. If I could become the first American he would learn to trust, even a little, he might let something slip.