Six Seconds

46

Blue Rose Creek, California

While Graham was in the hospital helping Maggie Conlin, his parked car was being studied by two men who’d followed him from her neighborhood to the hospital.

No one noticed the strangers loitering around his sedan parked in a shaded corner of Inland Center Hos pital’s large, north lot, which was nearly filled to capacity.

The men were in their late twenties, clean-cut, dressed casually and wearing dark glasses. Visitors passing by saw nothing unusual as the pair leaned against the van next to Graham’s car.

They appeared interested in the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

But occasionally they spoke in low tones as they ignored the paper to scan the interior of Graham’s rental, looking for anything to answer their questions.

Who was he? Why did he visit Maggie Conlin? Why was she taken to hospital?

The taller man, Faker, was a doctoral student at UCLA visiting from Amsterdam. He was studying re

Six Seconds 289 ligious philosophy. Faker, a U.S. citizen, had lived largely in Dubai, Bahrain and Doha with his father, an oil executive from Houston. When Faker rejected his family, he wandered the world in search of answers to life.

He found them in the extreme anti-West movements of European campuses.

His friend, Sid, was raised in Brooklyn, New York. A deeply introverted young man, Sid had been aban doned as a young boy and raised in foster homes where he’d been abused. As a teen, he sought solace in a number of storefront religious groups before he ulti mately left for Afghanistan, where he joined the Taliban.

Faker and Sid were believers.

They were also security agents for the network’s most important project. Their job was to ensure nothing threatened its success.

“Sid, there. See?”

On the passenger seat, under a corner of an open map, luggage tags from Graham’s carry-on bag peeked out, offering them his name and address. Quickly, they made notes, including the letters RCMP-GRC, which framed one of the tags.

The men then vanished into their vehicle some distance away but within sight of Graham’s car.

Behind the darkened windows of their vehicle they worked very fast on laptop computers, using search engines, news databases and Web sites.

Within minutes they learned the stranger who had visited Maggie Conlin was Daniel Graham, a corporal with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada. Graham was from Alberta and, according to news reports, part of the investigation into the sudden deaths of Ray Tarver, the reporter from Washington, D.C., and his family.

“They’re getting close,” Faker said. “We should alert our uncle.”

Faker reached for their satellite phone and in seconds his call bounced off satellites orbiting miles above the earth to a secured series of relays in Istanbul, Vienna, Prague, Casablanca, Lagos then to Addis Ababa.

The scrambled signal remained beyond the immedi ate reach of the NSA security net. When the call was answered in Africa, it was followed by a cryptic con versation in an ancient language.

“Hello, uncle, this is your nephew in California.”

“Yes, and how is the family?”

“They’re fine for now, but we have some news. We may not be able to go forward with the event. A stain has been found on Grandmother’s carpet.”

A few moments of silence passed before Faker con tinued.

“Uncle, we’re getting close to the event, Grand mother would be disappointed if something went wrong. We suggest we attempt removal of the stain.”

Several beats of silence passed.

“Uncle, do you agree?”