“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.

“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.”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net