Will couldn’t stand to look at him again. He knew that the core thing he hated about Dobie was the same rotten core that had festered inside of Will’s own eighteen-year-old self. Dobie had no real autonomy, no moral compass. He was nothing but a loaded gun waiting to be pointed in any direction.

The difference for Will had been Amanda. She had descended into his life six months after he’d been forced to leave the children’s home. Will was sleeping on the street. Stealing food. Working for bad men who paid him to do bad things. Amanda had dragged Will away from a life of crime. She had pushed him into college. She had forced him to join the GBI. She had made it possible for Will to be the kind of man who could be with a woman like Sara.

He told Dobie now what Amanda had told Will all those years ago. “You do what’s right, not what’s easy.”

Dash said, “Amen, brother.”

Will gritted his teeth so hard his jaw throbbed.

He’d spent the last twelve hours looking for opportunities to kill Dash. The man was never alone. Gerald shadowed him. At least two brothers were always flanking his sides. The blue Simunition kit on his Glock 19—Will’s Glock 19—had been changed out by the time Will had left Sara’s cabin. Even now, Dash kept habitually checking the chamber to make sure the gun was loaded. Will was not against a suicide mission, but there had to be at least a 10 percent chance of success.

Dash said, “We do the Lord’s work today, Major Wolfe.”

Will grunted. He didn’t need to be Jack Wolfe anymore. He slipped his fingers under the padded vest. Sara’s headscarf was folded against his stomach. Will had found it where she’d left it at the top of the stairs. A single red hair was wrapped inside. Now, he rubbed the hem between his fingers. He could feel her lips pressing into the palm of his hand.

My love.

Dash tapped the butt of his rifle on the floor. Every time he felt the men start to lag, he made another speech. “Brothers, today, we reclaim our dignity. That is our Message. We won’t be ignored. We are the leaders of this world!”

Feet started banging on the floor. Fists were raised as they cheered.

This was what Will was going to do when they arrived at their destination:

As soon as the van doors opened, Will would use his Glock and his Sig Sauer to kill as many of these men as possible. The rifle was too risky. Will didn’t know how many civilians would be on scene. The fact that all of his targets were wearing black uniforms easily identified them as the enemy. They were overconfident from the endless drilling. They would panic the second bullets started firing back at them.

Will had sixteen rounds in the Glock, eleven in the Sig Sauer. Two more magazines on his belt increased the total by thirty.

Forty men. Fifty-seven bullets.

The first two shots were going to stop Dash’s heart.

19

Wednesday, August 7, 8:58 a.m.

Faith looked at her watch.

8:58 a.m.

She was sitting on a bench inside Atlanta airport’s international terminal. Her head was in her hand. Her cell phone was burning the tip of her ear. Amanda had been livid since they’d lost Will yesterday afternoon, and her temper had reached DEFCON levels when she’d been ordered to brief the governor at the Capitol this morning.

She told Faith, “Everything we’ve found out so far points to the airport. Michelle Spivey was there right before the bombing. Dash and his crew must have been with her. What were they planning? Why did they risk exposure? Did they succeed? Is there a second part to the plan?”

Faith didn’t need to be reminded of the questions. She had worried them around in her head like an oyster making a pearl as she fought traffic to get to the airport this morning.

Amanda said, “The last thing that I should be doing right now is standing around watching a bunch of greedy politicians shove biscuits into their mouths.”

In the background, Faith could hear footsteps and voices echoing around the Capitol’s marble atrium. The governor had called a special session to vote on funding the latest hurricane clean-up. The building didn’t have a cafeteria, but where there were politicians, there were always lobbyists willing to bribe them with free food.

Amanda said, “Lyle Davenport didn’t pick his attorney out of the phonebook.”

Faith got a bitter taste in her mouth. Davenport was the punk who’d driven the red Kia up to Will at the Citgo yesterday. Amanda had sent a highway patrolman to pull him over for speeding. The subsequent search had revealed an unlicensed weapon in his car. The kid was already holding his lawyer’s card when he was told to lace his fingers behind his head.

Faith told Amanda, “Spending a night in jail hasn’t persuaded Davenport to mention Dash or the IPA. His arraignment is in three hours. First-time offense, white kid from the suburbs, he might get bail.”

“And if we tip off the prosecutor to who he is, then Will’s cover will be blown.” Amanda uttered a very rare, very nasty curse.

Faith silently ran through several of her own. Her anger was not restricted to the jackass kid who’d invoked his legal rights. Faith had spent two hours hanging out of a helicopter with a pair of binoculars looking for Will. It was only by sheer perseverance that she’d spotted the dirt bike outside of the two-mile radius. None of the residents in the area had recognized the bike. No one reported seeing a teenager and a man on the road, let alone another vehicle picking them up. The bike’s VIN number had been scratched off with a grinder.

She told Amanda, “Forensics is going to try an acid treatment to raise the VIN. If that doesn’t work, I have some other ideas.”

There was a loud noise on Amanda’s end, a bunch of men laughing. Faith heard Amanda walking away from them. There weren’t a lot of areas in the Capitol for privacy. The Gold Dome was basically an echo chamber.

“Talk to the airport commander,” Amanda ordered, as if Faith wasn’t at the airport right now to do that very thing. “I don’t care what you have to do or what lies you have to tell, but find out what Michelle Spivey was doing on that service road Sunday morning and report to me the second you hear. The very second.”

The background noise abruptly stopped.

Faith looked at the time.

9:01 a.m.

The commander of the Atlanta Police Department’s airport precinct was officially late for work. Faith had a feeling that he wasn’t going to be much help anyway. Everybody had a piece of the airport. The man couldn’t take a crap without coordinating with the FAA, the TSA, Homeland Security, and various law enforcement agencies representing Fulton and Clayton County as well as the cities of Atlanta, College Park and Hapeville.

Then there was the FBI.

Faith assumed that Van had confiscated any relevant security footage of Michelle Spivey. This entire morning already felt like the worst Groundhog Day ever. Will had disappeared again. Sara was still missing. So was Michelle Spivey. There were no more leads to follow. They had no idea what Dash was planning. Another night had dragged out with Faith pacing and cursing and fuming and looking up useless information online.

She had never for a minute trusted that stupid GPS tracker in Will’s holster. The device was too thin. It wasn’t waterproof. The signal relied on the old 3G network. Despite Amanda’s orders, there was no way in hell that Will was going to turn it on unless he was actually physically in possession of Sara. God only knew what he was doing right now. He could be injured or lying dead in a ditch. Dash was a psychotic killer. Michelle was stone-cold crazy. Sara had no way of protecting herself. The IPA was so terrifying that the woman who was in charge of monitoring them was losing sleep.

Faith dropped her head back against the bench. She stared at the squiggly blue neon arcing across the high ceiling. Every agency in the state was on high alert, but no one knew what they were supposed to be looking for. They were in Bin Laden Expected to Attack in US territory. The presidential briefing had hit a month before 9/11, but in what intelligence agencies called a Failure of Imagination, no one had thought something so outrageously brazen would ever happen.

As Aiden Van Zandt had said, there wasn’t a lot of there there.

The piercing wail of a toddler pulled Faith out of her misery. There was a certain amount of peace in knowing that she was not the mother on the other end of that wail.

Faith stared at the massive security screening area. The precinct commander would exit through the employee line. Passengers slowly funneled through the eight open lanes, unpacking their bags, taking off their shoes, standing with their hands up in the scanning machines. Faith couldn’t believe the airport was so busy this early in the morning. The international terminal was huge, almost as big as a soccer field, with a balcony ringing the second story of the atrium. There were fast-food places and a fish restaurant and a bookstore and cafes and airplanes waiting to whisk you away from your life.

Faith had never been on an international flight. Her cop’s salary, along with her propensity for having children out of wedlock, had put a major dent in her travel budget.