Close enough. It just needed to satisfy a bored deputy creeping along and probing the darkness with a door-mounted spotlight. He pocketed the shells and made his way back to Gray’s car. Walsh lay on his stomach, scanning the pavement underneath the vehicle with a flashlight. Rudd took a look around, satisfied with the scene.
“Looks good,” said Rudd. “One of your guys will drive the car. If all goes well, we shouldn’t be on the road for more than five or ten minutes.”
Walsh rose to his feet. “Sounds like a plan. Do you want to space out the vehicles so we don’t draw too much attention? I don’t think these roads see more than three cars all night.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Rudd. “But not until we get clear of this little town.”
“All right. We’ll follow closely until—”
Walsh stopped midsentence, his attention drawn to something over Rudd’s shoulder. Their radios squawked simultaneously.
“We’ve got company. Single set of headlights to the west, moving toward the intersection.”
Rudd turned to face west, the distant lights flickering between the trees on the outskirts of town.
“Cop?” asked Walsh.
“I don’t see how,” said Rudd.
This little speck of a town didn’t have a police force. It was part of a rural administration district that relied on the county for emergency services. Something he had taken into consideration when planning the ambush site.
“Looks like they’re headed here in a hurry,” said Walsh.
“It sure does,” said Rudd.
“A cop kind of changes everything.”
“It does and it doesn’t,” he said, fiddling with the fake FBI credentials in his back pocket.
“How do you figure?”
“Same plan, but we’ll have to put some serious distance between here and our next stop,” said Rudd. “The whole county will be crawling with cops by sunup.”
CHAPTER 7
Devin clasped the hot mug of coffee with both hands, straining to keep his eyes open. The individual interviews, which felt more like interrogations, had lasted most of the night, eventually yielding to a general debriefing, which dragged on far longer than he’d anticipated. He sensed it all coming to an end, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d come to the same conclusion twice over the past few hours, only to get up and refresh his mug when it became clear he’d been wrong. At least the coffee was good. Nothing worse than sipping a nasty cup of joe for hours—against your will.
The debriefing location wasn’t too shabby, either. A posh estate somewhere in Virginia, about an hour out of DC if he had to guess. He’d quit paying attention about halfway through their three-hour surveillance-detection route. Definitely a welcome change from the fluorescent tube–soaked rooms in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
He took a measured sip, hoping to take this mug past the finish line. Brendan Shea, Devin’s immediate supervisor and tonight’s operation lead, sounded as though he was wrapping up the debrief. Again. When Shea stopped to check his tablet, presumably scrolling through the intelligence feed he’d referenced earlier, Devin sensed they were done. For real this time.
“All five of our friends from room four thirty-four arrived at the KLM ticket counter at Dulles,” said Shea, eyes still focused on the tablet screen. “The counter opens in a few minutes.”
“Are we following them?” asked Jason Hart, the operation’s surveillance lead.
“As far as we can,” said Shea. “You know how that goes.”
“Have we ID’d any of them?” asked one of the DA operatives.
Shea shook his head. “Nothing yet. We’re working our contacts at the FBI for some fingerprint help and running their mugs through all of the proprietary digital identification software. If they have a social media profile or got their picture taken for the local paper at some point during the digital era, we’ll get something.”
“Any guess what we were dealing with?” asked the same operative. “The crew in four thirty-four looked a little crusty to me. Definitely professionals, but maybe not the highest quality? It felt like kind of a bargain-basement team.”
“Same with the stairwell,” said Devin. “The woman in four thirty-two gave off more of an A-team vibe.”
“We probably won’t have any idea until we get an ID hit or pull something from one of their phones,” said Shea. “We grabbed two sets of car keys, one from the room and the other from the stairwell, but it’ll be a little while before we can risk sending anyone into some of the nearby parking garages to snoop around. My guess is the five at the airport will be long gone by then.”