Echo of War

17

Oliver, McBride, and Scanlon’s HRT maintained their vigil throughout the night, watching the shack’s interior through the night-vision scopes and listening to the remote microphone they’d slipped between a pair of warped planks in the rear wall.

Both Selmani and Mrs. Root had dozed fitfully, she curled in a ball, he leaned against the wall, instantly awake at her every movement or sound. Scanlon’s snipers were unable to get a better angle on Selmani himself, so all they could tell of the wire around Ms. Root’s neck was that it seemed to lead to the area of Selmani’s left hand.

At four A.M., a cell phone rang inside the cabin. Selmani fished the phone from his pocket, listened for a few moments, then replied in what McBride and the others assumed was Albanian. Selmani’s tone was plaintive, his cadence hurried. McBride knew the linguists at Quantico would give them a translation of the conversation, but it was clear Selmani was agitated. About what? McBride wondered

“If I had to guess,” Oliver said, “he’s not happy about being out here alone. We know there were at least six of them involved — where the hell are the others? What are they waiting for?”

Thirty minutes before dawn Scanlon ordered his team back to the inlet, where everyone waded to the opposite shore and trudged back through the forest to the road.

The daytime plan was to be one of containment. Scan-Ion’s men would stand rotating shifts in blinds along the inlet’s bank and in the swamp to its north, while FBI agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office and Lancaster County sheriff’s deputies would reprise their roles as local fishermen and spend the day cruising the Susquehanna River between Reed Island and House Rock Creek.

If Selmani tried to move, they would be ready to take him. If he stayed put, Oliver and McBride had until nightfall to decide how to best rescue Mrs. Root. Whatever the plan, McBride assumed FBI headquarters would push for action before another day passed.

As Scanlon arranged to have the surveillance tapes hurried to Quantico, Oliver and McBride drove back into Erbs Mill in Chief Nester’s cruiser, stopped briefly at the station so Nester could check in with his secretary, then drove to his house, a modest ranch perched on the banks of Tuequan Creek. Nester was divorced and lived alone except for a five-year-old basset hound named Betty.

He showed Oliver and McBride where the shower was, then laid out a breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausage links, hash browns, toast with fresh butter, and strong black coffee. After three helpings McBride pushed his plate away and groaned. “Thanks, Jerry, that was great. I can feel my arteries hardening.”

“Harder for the mosquitos to draw blood that way.”

McBride glanced at his watch. “Collin, how long for Quantico, you think?”

“We should hear something by noon, I hope. Till then, let’s get some sleep.”

“I’ve got couches in the basement,” Nester said. “Come on.”

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” McBride said. “I’ve got a call to make.”

“Root?” asked Oliver.

McBride nodded. “It’s time he got some good news for a change.”

McBride awoke to the sound of a cell phone trilling. He rolled over and glanced at his watch: 11:00 A.M. Sunlight streamed through the blinds covering the basement windows. On the other side of the room Oliver lay propped up on one elbow, his ear pressed to the phone. “Okay, thanks. I’ll call you when we’re there.”

“Something?” McBride asked.

“Maybe. They saw something on the video. We need a computer.” Just then, Nester came down the stairs. Oliver said, “Jerry, I need a computer, something with a fast internet connection.”

Nester grinned. “Boy, jeez, computers … I’ve heard of ’em—”

“Yeah, yeah. Smart ass.”

Nester laughed. “We’ve got a two-gig Dell down at the station with a DSL connection.”

“Wow. What do you use that for?”

“Oh, you know, hick stuff. Goat porn.”

“Jesus, Jerry.”

McBride asked Oliver, “What else, Collin?”

“They’re still working on tracking the call Selmani got, but Linguistics finished the translation. They’ll beam us the transcript. One interesting thing: Either Selmani’s a polyglot or he isn’t Albanian.”

“What?”

“The language he was speaking — it wasn’t Albanian. It was fluent Bosnian.”

Twenty minutes later they were at the police station. With Nester and McBride looking over his shoulder, Oliver sat down, typed the FBI website’s URL into the browser and hit enter. On the home page he clicked the link for “Laboratory Services” and entered his password.

He flipped open his cell phone and speed-dialed a number. “It’s Oliver; I’m there. Which file?” He listened for a moment, then hung up. He turned to Nester. “This thing have a microphone?”

“Yeah, a built-in. It’s in the control panel.”

Oliver clicked into the Dell’s control panel and activated the microphone. Next he called up the website’s directory, threaded his way into a subset, then clicked on a file labeled SUSQEHANNAI. The screen went to black except for a line of PLAY/PAUSE/STOP icons along the bottom. In the upper right corner a small loudspeaker icon appeared, indicating a voice macro was running.

“Agent Oliver, are you there?” the Quantico technician said.

“I’m here.”

“Okay, here’s what we found: You had a lot of video to cover, so we pulled in another duty shift and divided it up between us.”

“I appreciate that.”

“No problem. We got our break at about one-nineteen in the morning. I believe it’s when you had the sniper zoom in on Mrs. Root. I’m putting it on your screen now.”

After a moment, the blackness on the monitor dissolved into the familiar green-white image of the cabin’s window, through which Selmani and Mrs. Root could be seen in their usual positions. The video counter read 01:18:06 A.M.

“We had to invert the colors and wash them out,” said the technician. “But I think you’ll be able to see it. I’ll slow it down when the camera starts zooming in.”

As advertised, the screen turned to a black-and-white negative image; the images of Selmani and Mrs. Root were ghost-like, hazy. They reminded McBride of those new-agey aura photos he’d seen on some occult show on the Discovery Channel.

The counter clicked to 01:19:01. The camera began zooming in, focusing on Mrs. Root’s ankle and the crescent-shaped scar there. After a moment it began panning upward to her head, where it paused again. The wire around her neck was clear now, a black band across her throat. Now the video slowed again, moving jerkily, frame-by-frame as it panned across the black hood covering her face.

The video froze.

“There,” the technician said. “Over her shoulder … where the wall meets the floor. See it?”

Oliver and the others leaned toward the screen, squinting.

The technician said, “The black stripe that runs along the baseboard …”

“I see it,” said McBride.

“Okay, now keep your eyes on it.”

The video began moving again, pausing at each frame as the camera swept toward Selmani. As McBride watched, the black stripe along the floorboard diverged from the wall, then joined the wire leading to Mrs. Root’s neck before finally disappearing around Selmani’s knee.

Oliver was the first one to understand what he was seeing. “Oh, God. It’s under the floor.”

The technician said, “We worked with the scale and shading then had an explosive guy come over and take a look. He’s pretty sure it’s electrical det cord. Collin, your guy’s got that shack wired to blow.”