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“Stop!”
Nassar followed, keeping Halabi’s men in his peripheral vision as Wilson pushed the policeman aside.
“Who are you?” he said to the woman.
Her words came out in an unintelligible jumble, so the policeman spoke for her. “She says she works here. That she lives in the servants’ quarters at the back.”
“Is there any reason to believe that’s not true?”
The man shrugged.
“Calm down,” Wilson said. “We’re not here to hurt you and you’re not under arrest. Now tell me. Where is Claudia Dufort?”
“I . . . I don’t know. She hasn’t been here in many months. I care for the house.” She looked past him for a moment at the dead animals lying in the grass. “And the dogs.”
He pulled out a photo and held it up to her. “Do you know this man?”
She nodded. “Mitch. He’s an American.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“When he came to help get Claudia and Anna’s things.”
“So months ago.”
She nodded.
“How do you communicate with them? Do you have a phone number?”
“No. An email address.”
“Okay. Go back to your quarters and stay there until I tell you to come out.”
She rushed off and he turned to Nassar. “Her story matches what we already know—that Dufort and her daughter have been living with Rapp in the U.S.”
“Agreed. Questioning this woman would be a waste of time. Rapp wouldn’t reveal anything to a servant.”
He followed Wilson into the house and a brief search turned up an office at the back. It was only three meters square and contained little more than a desk, a computer, and a single chair. Wilson immediately sat and turned on the computer. Not surprisingly, it requested a password. He swore quietly and rebooted it from a thumb drive.
“Your computer experts still haven’t been able to access her tablet,” Nassar pointed out. “What makes you think you can get into this?”
“People are funny,” he said. “They feel safe in their homes. So while they secure the hell out of their phones and tablets, they tend to be lazy with their desktops. They want it to be easy, they want their kids to be able to get on, and they figure no one will ever have physical access to it.”
Nassar riffled through a stack of papers but found nothing more than notes from the girl’s school and receipts for inconsequential household products. Finally, he wandered back out into the main part of the house as his and Halabi’s men tore the space apart. Normally it wasn’t his practice to get personally involved in these kinds of operations, but there was little choice. His life depended on the American FBI agent finding Rapp. Every minute that passed without success increased the danger.
After about thirty minutes a shrill laugh filtered through the home, reaching him as he passed through Dufort’s wrecked kitchen. He jogged back to the office and found Wilson grinning like an idiot at the computer screen.
“I found her daughter’s birthday on the calendar and reversed it for the password,” he said. “I hope she’s one hell of a piece of tail, because she isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“Is there anything of value on the hard drive?”
“I’m less interested in the drive than the email,” Wilson said. Nassar watched as he searched for all the correspondence with Rapp.
“Okay, let’s start on the date we know they left the U.S.,” Wilson said. “Yeah, there’s an increase in email frequency, so they may not be together. Or at least they haven’t been for the entire time.”
“I doubt Mitch Rapp would discuss something as sensitive as his location on a commercial account,” Nassar said.
“No,” Wilson replied, opening and closing successive individual emails. “But he might not have to. Don’t give this asshole too much credit, Aali. He’s not an intel guy. He’s just a killer.” The FBI man suddenly jabbed a finger into the screen. “Right there!”
