“And so are we,” said Jenssen. “Or so we are expected to.”

Aldrich squinted like he smelled something funny. “What’s going on here? Are you telling me that if we stood up, the six of us, and walked to the door and out of here, we would be arrested, or detained?”

Gersten smiled. She did not want to say yes.

“Really,” said Maggie, shocked.

“Under whose authority?” said Aldrich. “Is this Obama’s doing? Is that dismantler of the Constitution pulling another fast one?”

“Under the law,” said Gersten, “the Patriot Act gives us broad powers of investigation.”

“You mean ‘detention,’ ” said Frank. He turned to Aldrich. “It’s not Obama. You can blame Bush for this one.”

Aldrich didn’t like that. He turned an angry red, but could only say, “This is utter bullshit.”

Jenssen said, “So we are detained, we are prisoners here. Except where you want to trot us out on television to smile for the cameras?”

Maggie turned to them. “Come on,” she said, “don’t blame her.” She was defending Gersten. “It’s obviously not her fault. She didn’t volunteer to give up her Friday night to take our abuse.”

Gersten smiled, saying nothing.

Frank rubbed his unshaven face and said, “Look. Let’s all play the game for tonight. It costs us nothing. The fact remains that we did do something remarkable, and we are, quote-unquote, heroes. So let’s not overthink it. I feel a certain sense of obligation, but even if you don’t—then look at it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Television is fascinating from the inside out. We’ll go tell our story tonight, then get some much-needed rest and figure all the rest of it out tomorrow.”

The publicist clasped her hands. “I think that’s an excellent solution.”

Sparks turned around to Jenssen, still sitting with his arms crossed. She squeezed his knee in a teasing manner. “What do you say, hero?”

Gersten smiled at how ironic it was that the most naturally photogenic person among them was also the most reluctant to go on television.

Jenssen slowly smiled, some of it for Sparks, the rest releasing considerable wattage into the room. “I guess I have nothing better to do this evening.”

The mood lifted considerably. The publicist said, “We can tape at eight P.M. in their Times Square studio. To do so, we need to be in cars and moving at seven thirty, and until then you will have private time or a chance to connect with your families. Room service has been alerted to our schedule and will serve full dinners on dining tables in your suites at six thirty. Everybody clear on that?”

Nods and smiles all around.

Jenssen said, “Is there a gymnasium in this hotel?”

Gersten said, “There is, but we can’t give you access today.”

The publicist said, “We can try to build some time into the schedule tomorrow.”

Nouvian said, “Wait a minute. We already have a schedule for tomorrow?”

The publicist realized she had said too much. “Maybe,” she answered, as one of her assistants approached her with a piece of paper.

Maggie said, “If I’m going on national television tonight, I need some beauty work. And I mean, pronto.”

“Seconded,” said Sparks. “How about clothes that haven’t been stuffed in a suitcase for two days?”

The publicist finished reading the page she had been handed and looked up, smiling. “Then you will love this. Barneys New York has offered free shopping sprees for all of you. We’ll get the website up, you can plug in your sizes, place your orders online, and two of my assistants will have it here for you by six P.M. As to makeup, there will be professionals at the television studio tonight. Does that get you ladies where you need to go?”

Maggie and Sparks looked at each other in silent celebration. Even Nouvian grinned.

Aldrich said, “What the hell’s ‘Barneys’?”

The others all laughed.

The publicist said, “I’ll get that website up for you right away.”

Chapter 23

Coyote” was the tactical field operation code name randomly spit out by the computer. Still, it struck Fisk as somehow appropriate. Every e-mail and piece of paperwork would be slugged with it. He started with a sketch of his action plan for Dubin’s data files. How he planned to organize his people, his search and ID parameters, information security. Best to get the bureaucratic stuff out of the way early.

He held off putting his head down on his desk until the photographs came in. Dubin had ordered him to take a few hours in a duty bunk, but this wasn’t Fisk’s first long weekend, and he had an athlete’s knowledge of his own capacity for fatigue.

His computer pinged the summons he had programmed for urgent e-mails. The photographs from the overhead Stockholm jetway camera materialized on his screen.

A collage of six black-and-white images showed a slim man in a dark suit, pointedly looking down as he passed under the camera. At one point, the morning light through the jetway window had startled him into looking up. That was the best shot.

He was a classically handsome Arab. Dark eyebrows across the top of an angular square face, broad shoulders. The body of a man who would get heavy later in life, but who now radiated strength and confidence.

The image improved upon Bin-Hezam’s four-year-old passport photo, in which he sported a beard. But Fisk hoped Newark ICE would do better, and decided to wait for those before releasing these to the Intel machine.

The Newark customs hall photos came in on another computer chime. There were a dozen, most of them showing the Saudi at the baggage carousel. While the other passengers were visibly excited or relieved that their interrupted journey had come to a peaceful end, Bin-Hezam appeared like any arriving passenger disembarking from any airplane in any airport in the world. No expression, no pacing, no stretching. Head down, ignoring the exhilaration around him.

The shot from the eye-level camera at the immigration booth was the best of the bunch. He looked no different from any of the hundreds of young Arab men Fisk had known, though—unless he was reading too much into it—the man’s desert-black eyes looked darker than most, borderline supernatural.

Fisk magnified the image 150 percent. The Saudi had a nickel-size mole at the left end of his jawline, looking like a dark welt. The mole gave them a little bit of an edge, as an identifying mark—but the haystack was still absurdly big.

Fisk ordered fifty prints each of the enlarged full-face photograph and the full-color, full-body shot from the baggage carousel. His action plan was uncomplicated and, he was afraid, potentially hopeless. He had to pull every raker and mosque crawler off whatever they were doing to canvass the Muslim neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, betting everything on the Saudi’s likelihood of surfacing there.

Bin-Hezam had to know somebody in New York. He had to stay someplace. With friends or family? The Analytic Unit had come up with no domestic relatives, but in many of these cases a fourth cousin twice removed demonstrated the fidelity of a parent or sibling. Still, a hotel was not out of the question, and Dubin had forwarded Baada Bin-Hezam’s credit card information to the FBI.

Fisk’s best friends now were shoe leather and blind luck. He pulled up the informant tracking sheets and dispatched e-mails to the detectives running each of the thirty or so men and women out on the streets of New York, with strict caution against further dissemination. Then, like a patient taking his medicine, Fisk forced himself to go head-down for a while, sleep taking him almost instantly.

Fifty minutes later he popped back up, briefly disoriented, waking out of a dream in which a coyote was loose inside the Intel Division’s offices. He stood, needing to get his blood circulating, and inside of a minute felt alert and refreshed. He got a candy bar out of the break room vending machine and guzzled a caffeinated diet soda.