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“He called her a MILF,” Nash said in near disbelief as he thought of the acronym that stood for Mom I’d Like to Fuck. “What else did he say?”
“He said he wanted to do the same thing to Mom as he said he wanted to do to Shannon.”
“And then you hit him.”
Rory nodded.
“Good.”
“So I’m not in trouble?” asked a hopeful Rory.
“Not from me and not from anyone else, if I have anything to say about it.” Nash bent forward and kissed him on the forehead. “Let me have a word with your mother and then I’ll call you down.”
Nash stood and walked to the door. He stopped and turned back to his son and said, “Rory, do you like going to Sidwell?”
His son shook his head and the tears began to well up once again in his eyes. Nash felt like an absolute jerk for not being there for his son. For not putting his foot down and telli
ng his wife the way it was going to be. His job was sucking the life out of him, and his family was suffering for it. Nash decided, at that moment, he was going to do Rory right and set things straight.
CHAPTER 50
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THE mosque was a converted corner grocery store in a crime-ridden part of town about a mile east of the Capitol, not far from the Congressional Cemetery. It was three stories of brick, chipped paint, and rotted wood. The van circled around the block once to see if they could spot any surveillance, but everything appeared to be ordinary, and besides, their contact had not waved them off by using the prearranged phrase. Hakim pulled the van into an open spot two blocks away on the opposite side of the street and handed the keys to Farid. If he saw anything unusual, or had not heard from them in fifteen minutes, they were to leave the area and head straight to a small warehouse he had leased three miles north of where they were.
Both Karim and Hakim checked their weapons before leaving the van. Karim also grabbed a radio and stuffed it in the big front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. With a nod to each other they exited and crossed the street side by side. Hakim’s gait was relaxed, while Karim’s was hurried. And while Hakim casually looked up and down the tree-lined street, Karim’s eyes nervously darted from one parked car and tree to the next.
“Relax,” Hakim said in a slow, easy voice. “In a neighborhood like this, looking nervous is a good enough reason for the police to stop and question you.”
Karim slowed his pace to match that of his friend’s and forced himself to stop swiveling his head in every direction. He found comfort in the fact that they were going to a mosque. If he had not seen it with his own eyes in Afghanistan, he would have never believed it, but he had, so he did. The Americans bent over backward to stay out of their mosques. Even when fired on from the mosques they would wait for hours or days until Afghan soldiers arrived, but they themselves would not set foot in them. This had enabled al-Qaeda and the Taliban to store many of their weapons safely in mosques that were spread out across the countryside as they retreated, and then in the spring when they would start a new offensive they would simply collect them and pick up where they had left off. To Karim, it was one of the more glaring examples of how foolish and weak the Americans were.
Half a block away from the mosque they noticed a silhouette in one of the upper windows. It was a three-story building with the mosque itself on the first floor and then offices and apartments on the second and third floors. The structure occupied half of the city block, and while it was ugly, it served its purpose well. A cloud of cigarette smoke wafted out from a doorway fifteen feet ahead on the left. Both men slowed.
“Joe,” Karim said in his best Americanized English.
A head popped out, and a small man with a large nose and even larger ears glanced around the door frame at them. He flashed a nervous smile and said, “Chuck.” The man took one more drag and then flicked the cigarette to the curb as he stepped from the doorway. He held out his arms and said, “It is good to see you.”
The two men embraced, kissing each other once on each cheek. The small man then embraced Hakim, and then the three of them went inside.
“Here, this way,” the small man said as he held open a door that revealed a staircase.
They went down the creaking wood stairs to the basement and entered a big room with a low ceiling and exposed pipes. There were shelves on all the walls, and off to the left was an old delivery elevator that came up through the sidewalk. Hakim glanced at it, because a few weeks earlier he had used the elevator to unload a very important shipment. There were other storage rooms and two offices located down a hallway at the back of the space.
“Why do you look so nervous?” Karim asked the small man.
Hakim thought it a stupid question, since the man always looked nervous about something.
“There has been a development,” the man they called Joe said anxiously.
“What kind of development?” Karim asked, suddenly concerned.
The man’s name was Aabad bin Baaz. He was a fellow Saudi who had met Karim when they were undergraduates at King Faisal University and then had followed him to the Islamic University of Medina. Hakim not so affectionately referred to the man as the ferret, due to the fact that he looked like one. He was short, only five feet six, and he had a large hook nose and floppy ears that he tried to hide by growing out his hair.
Aabad timidly shuffled from one foot to the other and then pointed back toward the hall that led to the storage rooms and offices. Looking at Hakim, he said, “I had the camera installed, as you suggested.”
Hakim could feel Karim’s eyes on him, so he turned and quickly said, “After we received the shipment we put a lock on the door and I told him”—he pointed down the hall—“to install a small surveillance camera so we could keep an eye on things.”
Karim turned back to Aabad. “Continue.”
