In the Company of Liars

ONE DAY EARLIER
SUNDAY, APRIL 11

McCoy sets a steaming cup of coffee on her desk and drops down in her chair. She hasn’t had a weekend off this entire year, but no one has told her to come in. This operation does not know weekends from weekdays. The bad guys don’t take days off, so neither will she.

Her office is nothing short of disastrous. She didn’t inherit the typical female gene for neatness or cleanliness. Stacks of paper line her floors, force her to walk an obstacle course just to reach her desk. She has received countless comments on this from her colleagues, and no, she doesn’t prefer it this way, but it is what it is. Maybe they should have taught a course at Quantico on this.

She has made an exception, however, for this operation. She had a new set of cabinets brought in, devoted to the files on this case. It has helped dramatically, being able to call up a file on a moment’s notice. She has had her setbacks, falling into her typical practice of setting down a piece of paper somewhere and forgetting where, but she even planned for that inevitability, making an extra copy of everything in her file and placing it somewhere else-her master files.

Owen Harrick walks into her office, dressed informally-a sweater and jeans-like McCoy. “Haroon sent this e-mail yesterday,” he says.

With the assistance of a warrant signed by a federal magistrate, the FBI is monitoring Ram Haroon’s e-mail, not only the address assigned to him by the university but also another address Haroon uses,pakistudent@interserver. com. It is from this address that Haroon has been communicating on sensitive issues. Haroon rarely uses this address, which makes any correspondence he sends from it raise flags all the more quickly with the Bureau.

The e-mail that Harrick places on McCoy’s desk is one sentence:

Please inform MAB that communication will be sent early next week by mail.

She reads the initials-MAB-and feels a shudder, a knot seizing her stomach.

“Let’s watch the post office, then,” she says easily to Harrick, because she wants to show calm to her partner. He is undoubtedly feeling the pressure as well. Neither of them has ever worked on anything nearly so consequential.

“He’s talking about Muhsin al-Bakhari, isn’t he?” Harrick asks.

“Who knows, Owen? Let’s just do our job.” McCoy takes a piece of paper and writes out a quick to-do list. They will put people at the post offices around the state university. They will have to be ready, starting tomorrow, for a package that Ramadaran Ali Haroon will be sending to his partners overseas.