I asked, “And?”

“They got a hit,” he said.

A chill ran down my back. Literally, a chill.

Howie came out of his office. He waved his hands to quiet the office, then pointed at me. The place went dead quiet. Until recently, my source continued, that hand had been attached to an American citizen of Middle Eastern descent. “A guy from Michigan. Detroit area. The only thing we know so far is that he traveled to Egypt twice last year.”

As I listened, one question plagued me: Would I have to wear a tie to the Pulitzers next year? “What’s going on now?”

“Rainbows and lollipops.” The opposite of a shitstorm. “Soon as we got the ID, our guys began tracking his phone records. We’ll find out who he’s been talking to. Some people from the Detroit task force are going out to take a look right now. But they don’t want to shake the tree yet.”

“So whatta you think?” I actually wasn’t surprised. As hard as it was to accept, domestic always made more sense to me than international. Everybody in law enforcement knows there is a layer of bad guys moving undetected around the country, like the cave snakes in Raiders; nobody talks about it because there is nothing they can do about it. The people I know had always believed domestic terrorism was a far greater danger to this country than an away team. And the level of coordination necessary to pull this off without attracting attention required an understanding of this country beyond the capabilities of foreign terrorists.

“I like it,” he decided. “We been tracking a thousand leads. Ten thousand. A bunch of them looked good for a while. This is the one that’s panned out. This guy was in the tunnel, we know that for sure.”

“You got a name?”

I waited through a long silence. Qui tacet consentit. Silence gives consent. He had the name, he was just connecting neurons, trying to figure out if it could be traced back to him. Slug that I am sometimes, I debated asking him about his sister again, just slightly ginning up his guilt.

It wasn’t necessary. “Be careful how you use this, huh. It could cause me a lot of problems.”

“I know that.”

“Caleb Hassan.” He spelled it for me.

I repeated it letter for letter as if I was writing it down. “Anything else?”

I could tell he was reading Hassan’s sheet, probably off a computer, creating a portrait for me. Home address. His birth date making him twenty-nine years old. “Let’s just see what we got here. He did thirty months at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Center.” He hesitated, verbally shaking his head. “Rings no bells. For assault. He must not have been carrying. It would have been a lot longer than that if he’d had a gun. What else? He got his GED while he was in, and it looks like that helped him get an early release.”