| Prologue
Ahmed forced a smile of anticipation against the muffled laughter behind
him. The assembled group gazed up at the wall screen.
Looming against the wall, silent images pilfered from an Amtrak Web camera
showed a railroad bridge that reached into mist and disappeared. Moments
later, the blur of a high-speed train materialized and vanished into the
fog. Ahmed felt his fists clench. Now, now.
A powerful but soundless explosion ripped through the haze and gave a
backlit glimpse of the last car, sideways on the track. Brilliant yellow
and orange clouds billowed as a second explosion lifted the car in mid-air
and flicked it into the gorge in surreal, halting movements.
Ahmed leaped to his feet and threw up his arms. “Allahu Akbar.”
Two voices took up the chant. “Allahu Akbar.” A handful of
people rose in ovation, followed by a group behind them. Finally, the
entire crowd joined the chant.
A blast speckled the screen image with flecks and streaks of purple and
black, evocative of a Pollock canvas. Beneath the haze, a section of the
bridge collapsed.
Ahmed bounded onto the podium, his shadow projected large against the
screen. He raised two fists to accept the applause and pumped his arms
when the accolades began to subside. “Let no one, after this, doubt
our reach,” he shouted in Arabic, seeking out and catching the gaze
of several men in particular.
“You honor us with your presence,” said a youth near the platform.
“The West has none to match your skill.”
Ahmed grinned. “I know that.”
The crowd took their seats, except for a grim-faced man in the back who
remained standing, his arms crossed. “The Americans know computers.
They will track us down.”
“No.” Ahmed’s scrawny figure stiffened. “No, they
will not.”
“You forget the one,” the man persisted. “He is close.”
Ahmed scanned the far side of the room and found a tall woman in the shadows.
Sharp light from an overhead lamp cut across her face, the right side
bleached of color, the left hidden in darkness. Their gazes locked. Yes,
the one is close.
Paige Langford strode through the April mist along Pennsylvania Avenue,
on route from her Capitol Hill townhouse to her job at the J. Edgar Hoover
building. A flash of recognition drew her into a newsstand where she scanned
the display to see what had caught her eye. The headline on The Washington
Times blared, “Trains Collide; Fifty Killed.” In smaller print
read the subheading, “Major Rail Corridor Severed.” The lead
photo showed a collapsed section of bridge, below which the ruins of several
railway cars jutted from water. A second shot focused on a mangled doll
washed up in river debris.
Paige lifted the paper from the rack and skimmed the article. Human error,
the officials said. A tick of intuition twitched at the corner of her
right eye. A high-speed passenger train, a freight train carrying chemical
explosives, and a bridge critical to the Northeast Corridor: This was
no coincidence. Fifty deaths. Her jaws tightened. The FBI would dig into
this and she would be at the point of that spear.
She carried the paper to the counter and froze, face to face with a tabloid
photo of Luc, sitting at the same restaurant table where he had proposed
to her two months earlier, the same table where he had sworn his commitment,
where she had swallowed her doubts and allowed him to slide the ring onto
her finger. The telephoto image, taken from across the restaurant, caught
the glow in Luc’s eyes as he gazed at the woman beside him, a striking
blonde whose hands he encapsulated in his own.
Paige swallowed hard and rubbed her right eye against the tick that had
returned. No, she thought. Once again, a story that surely is not what
it seems.
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